Author Archives: Gary

About Gary

I write and maintain code for various websites as both a professional and a hobbyist developer, and have used computer technology for most of my life.

27-Mist

Leave a reply

Spoutings

July 29, 2019 at 1:15 PM

THAT for six thousand years

—and no one knows how many millions of ages before

—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings

—that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour

—this is surely a noteworthy thing.

–Moby Dick; or, The Whale (Chap. 85: The Fountain) by Herman Melville

25-Vote

2 Replies

Senior Leadership

Citizens Climate Lobby

Although this road winds tortuously at times, and even appears to turn back upon itself so that we seem to return again and again to the same place, patient plodding does result in progress.

OUR REBEL EMOTIONS by Bernard Mobbs (1970)

24-Risk

Leave a reply

Often Focused

Drinking at least two cups of coffee a day could decrease the risk of death from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.

Coffee is rich in polyphenols, a group of compounds with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity which can be divided according to their chemical structure into flavonoids and non-flavonoids.

National Library of Medicine

23-Cosm

4 Replies

Everything

Map of the Universe According to Tycho Brahe’s System

Copperplate engraving on paper, hand colored from the Atlas Coelestis seu Harmonia Macrocosmica (Amsterdam, 1660)

How do you feel about it all?

22-Miss

2 Replies

Aviation

DECINZO (click for color)

There is an art, or rather a knack, to flying.

The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

Clearly, it’s the second point, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t.

You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING, Chpt 9, by Douglas Adams

22-Seat

Leave a reply

Reflection

AM-arqstudio, Braga, Portugal (2021)

If the space terms predominate in the expression for the interval between event-points, the interval is said to be space-like, since it is then possible to select a co-ordinate system–belonging to an observer with an admissible velocity, in which the events appear simultaneous, and therefore separated only spatially.

If, however, the interval is time-like the events cannot be simultaneous in any co-ordinate system, but there exists a co-ordinate system in which the space terms will vanish entirely, so that the separation between events will be purely temporal, id est, occurring at the same place, but at different times.

A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)