Juneteenth 2025 | Logos con carne
Today is Juneteenth, formally Juneteenth National Independence Day, a national holiday commemorating the ending of slavery in the USA. Here is the official Juneteenth flag: It uses the same colors …| 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
Almost exactly six years ago — in September of 2019 — I began having electrical problems. Power outages affected half the lights and plugs in the place. Getting an electrician in to fix it led to what became my worst experience with home service — a six-year saga with a disappointing ending. More precisely, five-and-a-half […]| Logos con carne
So, if a fortnight is 14 days (but counted as nights), then a fortjuly should be 14 years. I suppose it should really be a fortwinter to align with the counting nights aspect. But that would mean we’re on the 13th “day” (year) of this blog, and this post celebrates the blog’s 14th anniversary, so […]| Logos con carne
Today is Juneteenth, formally Juneteenth National Independence Day, a national holiday commemorating the ending of slavery in the USA. Here is the official Juneteenth flag: It uses the same colors …| Logos con carne
Another voice in the interweb wilderness| Logos con carne
5 posts published by Wyrd Smythe during February 2024| 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
The maps you find in some buildings and malls have a little marker flag that says, “You are here!” The marker connects the physical reality of where you are standing at that moment with…| 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
10 posts published by Wyrd Smythe during October 2015| Logos con carne
We’re still motoring through numeric waters but hang in there; the shore is just ahead. This is the last math theory post… for now. I do have one more up my sleeve, but that one is more of an…| 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
3 posts published by Wyrd Smythe during February 2025| Logos con carne
Maybe this is on me; maybe I lack proficiency with English grammar. That’s always possible. I certainly have no pretension of being a grammarian, but I like to believe I have some grasp of it…| Logos con carne
Among those who try to imagine alien first contact, many believe that mathematics will be the basis of initial communication. This is based on the perceived universality and inevitability of mathem…| 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
Not quite a year ago I posted about watching the Chinese adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, a 2006 science fiction novel by Liu Cixin. At the time, I’d only seen the adaptation. Since then…| 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
