Seeing as how my previous post was the one-hundredth post I’ve written since reloading this blog a few months back, I thought I’d sprinkle your day with a small collection of other arbitrary numbers. They don’t mean much, and you may not be particularly interested, but some day, far in the future, they might be of meandering interest to future readers (or probably just me) trying to get a grasp on the efforts put into this space. 10 = Number of years writing this blog. Sigh. I was 24 when I started this damn thing. 100 = Number of blog posts I’ve written here since taking a break last year and then “reloading” this site earlier this summer. 197 = Number of subjectively “good” photos [...]
I should have been reading it, but I’ve been listening to Anathem. And I’m nearly through. Though, it has left a few lingering questions in my brain that I’m starting to consider might not be answered — or rather, might be puzzles left for the reader. If I had the dead-tree version I could have flipped back to review, or seen the text with my own eyes, and this might have helped with subdue this feeling. Alas. In my efforts to seek a little more information on this, the latest tome by Neal Stephenson, I dug, and ultimately I came across, online, a comment by someone who claimed that it was — and I’m paraphrasing here — like reading a fictionalized version of Gödel, Escher, [...]
Well, as promised, the big announcement you’ve all been waiting for! Not only were there multiple people who got it right, but there were exactly THREE people who guessed correctly that the only completely true statement was Statement #3 — and guessed that prior to the FIRST DAY MIDNIGHT DEADLINE as per the rules. (Sorry, Chris. So close, but no soup for you. I’m a stickler, I know.) We figured the best way to conduct a random draw would be to let Claire do the dirty work. And fortunately, each of the three possible contestants had names that started with a different letter: To make it fair(er), everyone got two shots in the pot — luckily there were enough letter blocks — and Claire was [...]
Call it retroactive boredom. One day — I don’t remember when — a couple years back I was bored. Does that set the stage? I must have been typing odd conversions into Google, calculating the number of hours in a year, or the number of minutes in a decade. It was that type of bored. At one point, if I can pull the dusty file from my memory and recall exactly, I mentally notched out my age in years to a couple decimal points and asked Google to convert it to seconds — and surprise, it was a few millions short of a billion. Again if I recall correctly, I did the reverse: how many years are a billion seconds? And matching that to a [...]
Do I smell a tasty new family tradition? Mmm…. Pie. You know you want a piece. THREE .1415 92653 58979 32384 62643 38327 95028 84197 16939 93751 05820 97494 45923 07816 40628 62089 98628 03482 53421 17067 98214 80865 13282 30664 70938 44609 55058 22317 25359 40812 84811 17450 28410 27019 38521 10555 96446 22948 95493 03819 64428 81097 56659 33446 12847 56482 33786 78316 52712 01909 14564 85669 23460 34861 04543 26648 21339 36072 60249 14127 37245 87006 60631 55881 74881 52092 09628 29254 09171 53643 67892 59036 00113 30530 54882 04665 21384 14695 19415 11609 43305 72703 65759 59195 30921 86117 38193 26117 93105 11854 80744 62379 96274 95673 51885 75272 48912 27938 18301 1949………..
It’s not nearly a blizzard, but the snow is swirling in fits of wind that punch through the symbolism of a transparent transition. At least it is supposed to be symbolic. I’m supposed to recognize the moment of awakening like a knife plunging into a major artery. Or something even more dramatic. Maybe. Maybe nothing more than a blip. I’ve never done this before. I’m new. Today marks the day I am twenty-nine years, three hundred and sixty-four days (and now a little more than nine hours) old. Accounting for leap years, I am ten-thousand, nine hundred and fifty-six days on this earth. Nine-hundred and forty-six million, five hundred and ninety-eight thousand (give or take an few hundred) seconds, for the math heads out there. [...]
