Daily Archives: April 8, 2014

Our Land and Home

A Night

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Spring                                                                    Bee Hiving Moon

As I wrote a week or so ago, motel rooms are noisy:  the fans, the heaters, the coolers, television from other rooms, showers and toilets, even, at the Residence Inn, people playing basketball until 10 pm.  I’m sure if you stay at places better constructed than the ones I frequent, this may not be a problem, but for me it has made returning home to the exurban night a real blessing.

After 11:00 pm, 10 pm most nights, the silence here is noticeable.  No cars.  No motorcycles.  No loud music.  The dogs might snore a bit, but that’s a soothing sound.

I remember reading about a silent room in someone’s studio here in the Twin Cities, a place so quiet that it’s used for testing acoustical equipment.  The guy who runs the room said people couldn’t stand to be in the room for very long.  Apparently some level of ambient sound is necessary for us, or at least so expected that its absence suggests something’s gone wrong.  I wouldn’t mind spending time in that room, just to see.

Right now there is no thunder.  No wind.  No hail.  No arcosanti bell ringing in the storm. No Great Gray Owl hooting or wolf howling.  No lightning.  No fireworks from the neighbors across the street.  Only the sounds, what are they?, that fill the ear during times of silence.  A faint buzzing, a not unpleasant attempt by the ear to hear even when the stimulus is close to non-existent.  Silence.

 

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

An Afternoon

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Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Moving deeper into Book I of the Metamorphoses.  Next week I’ll set a schedule for translating, so many verses a day.  Plus I plan to set a schedule for certain additional research that will go along with this task, things like comparing Ovid’s stories with other accounts of the same myth, investigating key grammatical or etymological points and, the big one, getting deep into Roman history of the late Republic and early Imperial era, Ovid’s time.  Over the last couple of years I have purchased books about Ovid and his poetry, Roman poetry and comparative literature between and among Ovid and his peers.

(Deucalião_e_Pirra   Giovanni_Maria_Bottalla)

I’ve not been too willing to get into these areas in any depth until I felt the translating had reached some point, though I didn’t know what that was.  Well, now I’ve reached it.  And I’m ready to go the next step.

I spent a half an hour today and translated 5 verses, so my speed is picking up, though to be fair the difficulty varies, usually with regard to the length of a sentence.

Also in the mail today.  The nitrogen for the vegetable garden and my new Lenovo laptop. This replaces my old Hewlett-Packard, a sturdy and reliable machine that has been outstripped by cheaper processors and memory and the retirement of Microsoft XP.  It doesn’t have enough juice to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.  Tomorrow I plan to start it up and see what’s what.

General

The Big Fountain

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Spring                                                            Bee Hiving Moon

When old men gather, you expect what one friend calls “the organ recital.”  We had that last night.  Frank’s back.  Tom’s thumb. Even those with no organ about which to recite checked in as ok.  For now.

You might not expect these topics though.  Flash trading, now in the news a lot, showed up in Woolly conversation several years ago thanks to Scott Simpson’s attention to investing. He id’ed this algorithm driven, high-speed cable actuated technique as unfair.  Now many agree with him.

On computer assisted travel, aka the Garmin and other similar devices.  I found her ability to know right where I was and tell me 400 feet ahead of time that I needed to “Turn left at Old Knob Road” most amazing.  The two true geeks in the room, Tom and Bill, identified as much more impressive the Garmin’s ability to measure on the fly either the fastest or the shortest route to your destination.  This is, after I listened, a continuous solution to the traveling salesman problem:  “The travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard* problem in combinatorial optimization…” Wikipedia

*A problem is NP-hard if an algorithm for solving it can be translated into one for solving any NP-problem (nondeterministic polynomial time) problem. NP-hard therefore means “at least as hard as any NP-problem,” although it might, in fact, be harder.  Wolfram  (I added this just to clear things up.)

A movie review on Particle Fever, now at Lagoon Cinemas, from Tom (positively valenced), got us into the most interesting topic of the evening from my perspective, the recent publication of empirical support for the 30-year + old inflationary theory of the universe.  I won’t go into an explanation because this excellent NYT article does a wonderful job using a coffee press as an easy to grasp metaphor.

What I want to add to this astonishing discovery is my own metaphor concerning what it might mean.  If I grasp the implications of this inflationary theory correctly, it proposes that the big bang, rather than a one and done event (see NCAA basketball), is a forever red-shirted freshman, a player that can just keep on playing.  No, that’s not the metaphor.

Here’s the metaphor:  the big (or in Monty Python language, really huge, very enormous, most gargantuan) fountain.  Again, if I get it, the moment just after the big bang, just 380,000 years after (incredible precision for an event well over 13 billion years old), produced and continues to produce a fountain of universes, ever increasing.  I imagine them as large fireworks display, sending off into the darkness of whatever it is, a constant flow of brightly lit, unbelievably rapidly expanding-faster than the speed of light-universes.  A fountain of metaphysics, each spark a new reality, each with its own laws of physics, many of which will develop sentient life forms who, as in our anthropic universe, will look back in wonder at the moment of their creation, their universe becoming aware of itself.

And here’s one more interesting piece.  There is no looking behind the big fountain.  The power of its engine prevents any data surviving from before it began.  So, any speculation about the trigger:  God, the cookie monster, pure whimsy is both in bounds and never to be answered.  Now we look there darkly; later we will look there darkly, too.