Somehow the index files for my trip to Yosemite were AWOL. I recreated them, and it’s viewable again. I also need to clean up the diary of my trip for public consumption one of these days.

Tim’s trip to Yosemite, down th John Muir Trail

This quote is the kind of material that reminds me of why I like to listen to Prairie Home Companion and The Writers Almanac. Garrison Keillor is a genius with words, with both an ear for interesting words and a knack for speaking them with a delightful midwestern cadence.

When I last went to Summerfest, in Milwaukee, I saw James Taylor in the amphitheater. The review in the paper said that Mr. Taylor was like a favored pair of old blue jeans, “soft in all the right places, and tight in all the right places.” This sums up how I feel about Mr. Keillor’s radio work as well.

The question I am left with is the following. If we desire to recapture the feeling of seeing and feeling the world as we did when we are children — perhaps my time would be better spent trying not to teach my children to see the world the way I do.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

My blacklist, with imports from mamamusings.net’s blacklist, inspired by Liz’s experience.

On New Year’s day I drove up to Lake Vermillion looking for some quiet time to unwind and take in some natural beauty. Check out what I saw.

Each day I walked across the frozen lake. Distances across bays, on foot, were much larger than I had expected, even though I have canoed, kayaked, and motored around for over a decade. It was very quiet.

I was really intrigued by how the islands seemed like isolated bonsai displays.

I’m now reading “The Bug” and “Close to the Machine” by Ellan Ullman. I like them both alot. I hope the stories finish as well as they start. It’s fun to read a dramatic account of something that really does resemble my everyday life to some degree. I think I could write in this genre.

The Packers lost in the post-season to Philadelphia. While the loss was a huge dissapointment, the last six Packers games were a real treat to watch. The team played so well, even with serious adversity. Hat’s off to the team.

I was surprised by a few things in the last game. I expected the Pack to put up three point in the first half rather than going for first down on “Fourth and inches”. Those three points could have made the game. I was surprised they didn’t run more. Green was doing well, and the Pack was ahead, running should have been the plan. The last interception was also a bitter pill to swallow.

Well, thanks everyone for another memorable season.

Having recently read the book, “A Beautiful Mind” and less recently “Who wrote the Bible Code” (don’t worry I thought the Bible code was hooey before I read this book, this book just had some interesting approaches for suggesting exactly why it’s hooey), I thought I would take two disturbing ideas and merge them. What are the two ideas? One, you can get messages from numbers by converting numbers into base 26 with all numerals represented as the letters A-Z. Two, by skipping every n letters you can get wierd messages out of a textual corpus. Why would I do this? Have I gone over the edge?

No, and no.

I don’t think any words that might appear in my corpus could be anything other than chance, I am merely checking out the probabilty that text might appear in a seemingly random set of letters.

What’s the method to my madness. One d/l the first 100,000 digits of pi. Step two, use a little perl and Ken Williams, Math::BaseCalc to convert to base 26. Step three, wait longer than you think (Ken, can you make it faster?). Step four, using various skip steps look for words.

How I love perl!

O.K., I admit it I don’t follow celbrity gossip news very well. I don’t read People magazine, even in a doctor’s office when there is nothing else to read. However, even I usually hear about the marriage before their divorce/annullment. So it appears that sometime in the last month, I’m not sure when, Britney Spears got married and the divorced or annulled in something like 55 hours. The strangest part about this event, is why so many people care. Oddly enough, I became aware of it by reading a op-ed piece somewhere that suggested Britney’s sham marriage meant that gays and lesbians should be legally allowed to marry. I guess the thinking was something along the lines of, if hetero’s can marry on a whim, why can’t non-hetero’s marry after thoughtfully considering it. Not sure I follow that line of logic. In any case, on some days I am just libertarian enough to think maybe the state ought not to be involved in who can marry.

Today there are some good ones.

• Aluminium-ized apartment
• Tokyo’s Lost and Found
• Rotterdam Cube Houses

I finished up Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition”. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about it by the end. It contained numerous super clever idea’s, but truthfully in the end I didn’t find the story nearly as compelling as some of the ideas mentioned in passing while telling of the story.

I read “A Beautiful Mind”, by Sylvia Nasar. This was fascinating to me. The book goes into much more detail about Nash’s life, including better descriptions of his mathematical contributions, the story of how he got involved and left RAND. (His papers are available for ordering from RAND, BTW)

I then finished off “The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove”, by Christopher Moore. I like is less than “Lamb” and less than “Fluke”. It was funny in parts but I thought it got a little tedious by the end. Like Pattern Recognition, there were some very funny ideas embedded in the telling of this story. Just the idea of a whole town going off their psychoactive drugs all at once is a funny premise.