Yoga. This will take a while to get. Difficult for me, co-ordinating the various moves and it requires stamina and strength as well as flexibility. I probably have the most to gain in yoga of all the work P90X has to offer. Which means, of course, that I’m starting the farthest from where I want to be.
A few poses here. It will require real work to do them well.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Hmmm. I do like it when I’m scratching my head and I turn to the commentary to find, “Medieval and modern Latinists could make nothing of this.” Ah. At least I’m not alone.
Today I’ve started in the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha. This is an ancient flood narrative with parallels in Greek authors. In Ovid Deucalion and Pyrrha end up on the top of Mt. Parnassus and have to rebuild the human race after the flood. Right now Ovid is still describing the earth as the sea and extensive plains suddenly become water.
I don’t remember if I mentioned yesterday the image of dolphins swimming among the trees. Nice. Ships scrape their keels along the tops of hardy oak and mountain peaks.
There is controversial, but not crazy geological evidence for a flood in ancient, ancient times involving the Black Sea, sometime around 5,600 b.c.e. That’s this corner of the world and, of course, the Middle East is nearby, too.
Interestingly, in earlier translation work I ran across the Latin word, ararat. This is the pluperfect singular of a verb which means to plough or to till. It can also mean to cultivate land. Could the “flood” have been a period of wandering due to some natural disaster, maybe a flood, that resulted in Jews ending up on new land to farm? Don’t recall enough of my studies in Genesis to know if this is probable or not, but the Latin is suggestive.
I don’t know enough about the hebrew word or the Latin translation of it either. This is probably a coincidence, but it’s a weird one if it is.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
After a frustrating morning with a balky computer, I got into Robert Klein’s work on Missing. He’s good. Careful, detailed. I’ve only rejected one of his edits so far and that one I understood what he did, but chose my construction over his. I didn’t get far, but I’ll keep at it.
I wrote a private post earlier about my anxiety as I approached this stage. It’s still there, but the anxiety decreased as I worked. I hope that continues to be the case.
As I mentioned on Great Wheel, my computer is running a climate model with its unused processing power. This is part of an Oxford Study to determine the results in a particular model if it is run many times with slight variations. These slight variation can be very significant (think butterfly flapping wings), but without running these complex models over and over, tweaking them in slightly different ways each time, it’s impossible to know for sure what a particular adjustment will do.
Climate and weather modeling are big users of super computer resources and the work on my computer is part of a massively parallel processing strategy to, in effect, mimic super computers without having to buy them. The concept is simple. Each home computer has many times the computing power necessary for almost, if not all, the tasks it performs and, in addition to that, most of them sit idle most of the time. By downloading parts of larger task onto many, many home computers use can be made of both the idle and under-utilized processing power. The first one of these projects was SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence, and I was part of that one, too.
They are resource intensive, however, so some of my computer frustrations might have come from it modeling global climate in the background. I’m 95% with the task the Oxford folks assigned to me (well, my trusty Gateway is 95% done) and it may be a while before I take on another one. This run takes approximately 350 hours of processing time.
I can and do shut it off at times.