Whale Oil Beef Hooked

What wisdom knows

The ants I know swarm to meats. The flies I've trapped prefer vinegar. Why would anyone say otherwise? Where is the wisdom in all these books I've read?

The humans I know can't refuse sweets. The moths I've seen are still drawn to flames. Why one says what another can't see, may be to help them see what can't be said.

(still working on this)

Sparrows sing most anything

What would I see
if I could be
soaring aloft so high and free?

And what would I hear
as I drew near
the babbling brook clean and clear?

How would it feel
so unreal
burning within seeds of steel?

One last call
as down I fall
...

Good boy!

Old jokes: funny and not funny

Still Funny: This usenet post on May 12, 2001, from Keith F. Lynch to alt.math.recreational: Re: Converting Pi to binary (DON'T DO IT!)

Not funny Anymore: This January 17, 2001 article to The Onion Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'.

Minesweeper

Riceboy

Riceboy < Woodring but it'll do.

It's well drawn well enough and the lettering is nicer yet. The story, however, seems confounded by it's own premises and needs, in my opinion, less C.S. Lewis and more Jack Vance. I anticipated the ending back in chapter three. In spite of this I read the whole thing in one sitting.

The other kind of riceboy.

Type Morphology

Probably some fonts will work better than others.

Xx*+tf-=_~NHARQ4^MmwW3EFL<KkxXYTJS5938B&\`'.,/%7Zz2ad@?!:;ji!I1l|$Ss59gyqpePQ0OoD)}]>V<[{(CG6bhcnuUVvx

Humor table

From Fowler's Modern English Usage.

	MOTIVE or AIM	PROVINCE	METHOD or MEANS	AUDIENCE
humor	Discovery	Human nature	Observation	The sympathetic
wit	Throwing light	Words and ideas	Surprise	The intelligent
satire	Amendment	Morals or manners	Accentuation	The self-satisfied
sarcasm	Inflicting pain	Faults and foibles	Inversion	Victim and bystander
invective	Discredit	Misconduct	Direct statement	The public
irony	Exclusiveness	Statement of facts	Mystification	An inner circle
cynicism	Self-justification	Morals	Exposure of nakedness	The respectable
The sardonic	Self-relief	Adversity	Pessimism	Self

Archimedes' Universe

The Sandreckoner is a remarkable work in which Archimedes proposes a number system capable of expressing numbers up to 8 × 10⁶³ in modern notation. He argues in this work that this number is large enough to count the number of grains of sand which could be fitted into the universe.

This is from Mactutor's biography of Archimedes. The story of Archimedes well illustrates the wisdom of state-funded pure research, but also, ironically, follies of war.

Henry Mendell of California State University has a collection of Vignettes of Ancient Mathematics and there may be found his illustrated, commented translation of Sand-Reckoner.

Christmas Story

Last year, for Christmas, I read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This year, I'm reading James Joyce's The Dead.

Dubliners etext from Project Gutenberg.
Jorn Barger's annotated Dubliners
15 Usher's Island. The house where The Dead is set
The Dead was adapted into a musical which recieved mixed reviews

Update

Jorn Barger links to the World Wide Dubliners project which has an annotated The Dead. This is where I learned that, while The Dead is a Christmas story it's set in early January, for the epiphany, rather than Christmas day. I also learned a lot of other things indicating that I hardly understood the story when I first read it.

Interview with Jack Vance

In 1976 Jack Vance appeared for two hours on a radio show Hour 25 where he answered questions and opinionated for the hosts and a few call-ins. Posted on YouTube in may of this year by TimRMortiss, part one of 12.

Mnemonic

For new Oregonians.

U of O is in Eugene
and their colors are yellow and green
OSU is the other one.

Wikipedia on the "Civil War."

Audio Musings

I'm trying Alsaplayer for music playing. I like being able to control it from the command line. I like that it plays all kinds of files: wav, mp3, ogg-vorbis, flac, and ogg-flac.

Which reminds me. I wonder if the ogg developers have ever reconsidered the filename extension idea. Currently they insist that ogg files end with "ogg". However, since ogg can contain different kinds of data streams, it makes sense to me that they ought to have different extensions. Currently, I'm doing the dual extension thing: my ogg-vorbis files end in ".vorbis.ogg." It's just kind of funny to name a file "song.vorbis.ogg" and call it an "ogg-vorbis file" when talking about it.

The other day I was making a mix CD and I found this song I downloaded wouldn't burn because it was sampled at 16000 bps instead of 44100 bps. It took a bit of fiddling around with SoX to resample it. Sox is kinda like ImageMagick for Audio. I think ImageMagick has been around a lot longer because it's way more involved and seems generally more sophisticated at what it does. Anyway, it's great to have these kind of tools around.

It made me think though, there must be a way to take an audio file and have a an oscilloscope type program create an image file of the waveform.