I’ve been dog-sitting Ms. Bentley Beans since last Saturday. She’ll be hanging out with me until at least the first of October. We’ve been enjoying the fall weather, though it has…| Logos con carne
I’ve written about the Yin-Yang of analog versus digital, a fundamental metaphor for how reality can be smooth or bumpy. I’ve applied the idea to numbers, where we see two types of infi…| Logos con carne
Last time I wrote about analog recording and how it represents a physical chain of proportionate forces directly connecting the listener to the source of the sounds. In contrast, a digital recordin…| Logos con carne
Today I want to tie up last time’s post about animation before moving on to other things. I’m sure I’ll return to the topic of making movies with POV-Ray and FFmpeg; it’s ju…| Logos con carne
You probably have some idea of what infinity means. Something that is infinite goes on forever. But it might surprise you to know that there are different kinds of infinity, and some are bigger tha…| Logos con carne
Just for fun, here are a bunch of meme images I’ve made recently. Most of them were for the Notes section of Substack (its version of tweets). They’re all just my version of interesting memes I’ve seen or good lines that I thought deserved a nice image. Enjoy… And oldie but a good idea. I’ve […]| Logos con carne
Every once in a while, it’s time to update my 960 Months image: See Only 960 for an explanation. Stay ticking, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light. ∇| Logos con carne
2 posts published by Wyrd Smythe during September 2025| Logos con carne
As we slide into leafy glory of Midwestern fall — the Autumnal Equinox, my least favorite day of the year lurking dead ahead — thoughts turn nostalgic for the dying summer and by extension all those long-dead summers that tail behind. The older we get, the longer our 4D tail back through the years to […]| Logos con carne
It’s hard for me to believe 2025 is already sliding into fall. The leaves are starting to turn — the trees are ending their annual breath. Some geese are heading south — unmistakable signs th…| Logos con carne
I’m beginning to think this Friday Notes series is a Sisyphean Mission. While I’ve managed to reduce the main pile of notes to almost nothing (or at least nothing I feel like writing about), there remain other piles. Not to mention the way new notes constantly spring up like mushrooms in the shady damp part […]| Logos con carne
I have a great deal of respect for science fiction author William Gibson and what he contributed to the art but can’t honestly say I love his writing. Gibson and Bruce Sterling are widely viewed as the fathers of cyberpunk (hence the respect), but I find their writing sometimes opaque and challenging (though maybe that’s […]| Logos con carne
From this blog’s beginning in 2011 until the end of the 2019 season, I’ve written about the Minnesota Twins. But not so much since. One post in 2020, about the COVID-shortened season. One more in 2021, about how I seemed to have moved past baseball. That was pretty much it until this year. A number […]| Logos con carne
The previous post, Our Memories, suggested that — in large part because they become faded self-imaginings— we might want to consider not clinging to our event memories as much as we sometimes do. We might want to focus on what we are more than where we’ve been. Put it this way: What matters is what […]| Logos con carne
In another place, someone wrote: “It is memories that make us who we are, that haunt us, that enrich and warm us, that remind us of how to be better.” The place and the someone can be anonymous here because the sentiment is a common one. In this Brain Bubble, I’d like to push back […]| Logos con carne
I find myself (almost) surprised that July of 2025 is nearly over. The year seems to be slipping by quickly. One’s sense of time really does change as one gets older [see Perception of Time]. More to the point, this is the last Friday in July, so if I’m to get a Friday Notes post […]| Logos con carne
The last post, Smoke Alarm Saga, concerned the frustrations with my smoke alarms and the service vendor who installed them — a company whose failings apparently put them out of business. It wasn’t just the service; the product was bad. Three of the four smoke alarms they installed failed after seven months. In the midst […]| Logos con carne
About a month after I started this blog (on July 4, 2011), I wrote about my first and second skydives — which were tandem jumps — as well as my first (semi) solo skydive. A year later, I wrote abou…| Logos con carne
It’s been a while since my last Sidebands post. That’s partly because I’ve been working on a project that I’m sure will become a multi-post series and thought it would be ni…| Logos con carne
Be warned: these next Sideband posts are about Mathematics! Worse, they’re about the Theory of Mathematics!! But consider sticking around, at least for this one. It fulfills a promise I made …| Logos con carne
In this post I’ll show how Set Theory allows us to define the natural numbers using sets. It’s admittedly a very abstract topic, but it’s about something very common in our experi…| Logos con carne
Happy Pi Day! Also, happy 146th birthday to Albert Einstein. (I love that his birthday is Pi Day. Seems appropriate and makes it so easy to remember.) Over the years, I’ve written quite a bit…| Logos con carne
Last time, I wrote about irony and the perverse universe. This time I want to write about something just as fundamental. It has the technical name, entropy, and there is a very technical definition…| Logos con carne
Someone on another platform used the phrase “social entropy”, and it has been echoing in my head ever since. It strikes me as perfectly encapsulating what feels like the fraying of our …| Logos con carne
Over the last few weeks, on Amazon Prime, I’ve watched all 30 episodes of the first season of Three-Body, the Chinese television adaptation of the 2006 science fiction novel The Three-Body Pr…| Logos con carne
The weather has been so weirdly warm this month that I never got around to a Friday Notes for February, so I’m extending the month. Call it a leap year “plus one”. Truth is, IR…| Logos con carne
My final post in 2023 was about growth curves. It focused on the difference between geometric growth versus exponential growth — which turns out to be not much — and compared them to polynomial gro…| Logos con carne
Consider the lowly square, a four-sided shape with sides of equal length meeting at right angles. The embodiment of what we’re referring to when we refer to square miles, square kilometers, s…| Logos con carne
You may remember learning way back in grade school that you can’t divide by zero. You may remember being told that division by zero is undefined. But have you ever wondered why we can’t…| Logos con carne
You’ve probably heard the phrase “exponential growth” in reference to something that grows very fast. A common example is bacteria in a petri dish. More relevant in daily life, pe…| Logos con carne
I’ve written many times here about my issues with TV and movie adaptations of existing stories. Short synopsis: I usually find them lacking. Especially the more recent attempts. Extra especia…| Logos con carne
This is one of those geeky posts more a “Dear Diary” (or “Dear Lab Notebook”) entry than a post I expect anyone anywhere will get anything out of. This — in part — is about …| Logos con carne
Long ago (in the first year of this blog), I posted Sideband #34: The North Star, which was about how sighting on the North Star (Polaris) gives you your latitude. Simply put, the elevation of the …| Logos con carne