I honestly can't remember why I was suddenly so worried about the ephemeral nature of things yesterday. It has almost become a background thought for me.  Last night we had a brief thunderstorm.  Well, most of it missed us entirely.  I spent the day, earlier, clearing out my garage so I could get my car in it and keep it safe from "damaging hail." I got all but the last two feet inside.  There is an overhang, so that worked, even though I couldn't shut the garage door. We got very little rain, and absolutely no hail.

My kitty is growing old.  He sleeps a lot, even for a cat. I keep trying to feed him smelly canned cat food (Mmmm!) but he just licks it while it is still ripe in the bowl, and then wanders off so that the other cat can eat it all up. That cat is gaining weight but doesn't need to. Tigger keeps on truckin', driven possibly by curiosity, though because he is so experienced, I suspect it is just for form. His death will not be a thing, and will last no time at all.  It will just be a moment, with Tigger on one side, and no Tigger on the other.

Crazy weather for February, here in Kansas City.  Today it is sunny, with a predicted high temperature of 63º and, I hope, an eternal, warm afternoon.

Question

What's the difference between two things that are identical except that one of them is going to last a short time, and the other a long time?

Twenty-three Geese

Math Problem

If anyone out there has a talent for this sort of thing--I have already solved it, I think, but there was some guess work involved.  Looking for corroboration.

The problem is to determine the difference in distance around the inner and outer edge of a meandering walking/riding path that circles a lake.  It is a "closed loop," but not perfectly circular.  For the sake of argument, say the length of the path, along its centerline, is 3.8 miles. The width of the path, for the purposes of this problem, is 7 feet.

Logic tells you the "outer" edge of the path will be longer than the inner edge. But by how much?

Anyone?  I'll be watching the comments.

stolen picture

I stumbled across this animated .gif somewhere on the Internet but I can't find it again--at least not the origination of it. It seems to have been picked up and disseminated through cyberspace--probably in much the same way that I did. I'll leave it up, but will gladly take it down if someone out there claims it as their own and asks me to.  It's good, though.

---->

This in honor of Chaucer, who, it is said, (by Wikipedia,) first began the association of St. Valentine's day with the notion of romantic love.  I don't think I could completely recall what it felt like to be in love when I was fifteen, the age King Richard II of England and Anne of Bohemia were when they wed in 1382 and Chaucer wrote that poem about them.  Chaucer didn't write a poem about Roy and Diane, when we were fifteen, but that's only because he didn't know us.

The post stops here, because, like Halloween, this is a scary day, and right now grade school kids are riffling through the giant envelopes they constructed and taped to the backs of their chairs, looking for the valentine from that special person. And I hope you all find yours.

On the Continued Growth of Arithmetic Perspicasity in the Aging Brain

I felt the need to write a blog post this morning, but I can't think of anything to write about. St. Valentine's Day is not a good subject. Too overdone.

Great. I just dropped one of my ibuprofin on the floor, and it went under my desk.  It's dark down there, so I had to get on my hands and knees to find it. I found myself wondering about the "five-second rule," and if I could extend that to several minutes.  I pictured an ibuprofin lying on the floor for several months, covered with mold, and thought, OK, that's too long, but when did it become so, precisely?

A doctor on the radio was asked by a caller, what about the five second rule?  The doctor replied that the transfer of bacteria onto an object is pretty much instantaneous, but I noticed his answer was not instantly forthcoming.  There was a pause, during which the doctor and I both realized that he really didn't know the answer to that question.  I'm going to play it safe, and modify the rule to three-seconds, followed by rubbing all sides of the dropped item real hard on your pant leg.

Not in the same place I clean the screen of my iPhone, though, which is obviously going to be crawling with germs, and not anywhere if it is a powdered sugar doughnut or a jelly doughnut, or anything gelatinous.

Speaking of poor/aging eyesight, I use a wireless USB mouse with my laptop because I don't like the touch screen.  So, one of the USB ports on the left side of my laptop is occupied by a small device which serves as the receiver for the wireless mouse. This is really tiny, so that, apparently, it needn't be removed in order to slide the laptop into a cover or a case.  And it has some writing on it. A string of really, really tiny silver letters on a black background, about 7/16ths of an inch in length in total. At first I thought it was just a thin silvery line, put their for looks, or to give me a reference when trying to figure out which way is up before cramming the device into the USB port.  But then I got out my reading glasses, which didn't work, and then I took the device out and held it under my desk lamp, and then, with the reading glasses still on, held the device at arms length and squinted real hard and found there were actually two words:

N A N O  R E C E I V E R

Very interesting.  All this time it said something, and I didn't know it. But why would you label something but not want old people to know what it said?  Well, I'll never figure that one out. That's sort of like the icons on the buttons on my car radio that are either arcane popular culture references known only to people under the age of twenty-three, or Klingon. I still haven't bothered to try to set the clock because it's simpler to just subtract 2 hours and twenty-three minutes from whatever it says.

Alternative Universes

OK, I still haven't done anything today, except I did take this picture of my wife's cross-stitch-in-progress. (She wanted to send a picture of it to someone.) This is the one I mentioned in a previous post.  There is no letter J in this sampler, just like in the parallel universe upon which the characters in Heinleins "The Number of the Beast" stumbled, toward the beginning of the story.

There is another, real, explanation which is kind of interesting, I suppose, if you're one of those people who falls back on reality in times of stress. The letter J wasn't even in use anywhere until about the 1600s, and even a bit later in American English, so some old samplers do not use it.

La Vida Loca

Making fun of soap operas the other day, I said, nothing ever happens in them. You just see people talking about stuff that happened. Then I realized, owp, that's exactly how life is, at least much of the time. Stuff really only "happens" very rarely. Possibly more often in certain times in our lives, especially if we have ADD or low impulse control, or drink beer. Shit happens. But, for most of us, most of the time, it's a soap opera.  Once in awhile something really happens to you, and then you get to talk about it, and everyone else gets to talk about it, until something happens to someone else. It might take days or weeks.

Oh. YOUR life.  I thought I was talking about MY life.

Well, so far I've written a blog post today.

That's something.

theAbysmal Calendar

Recently I stumbled across something called theAbysmal calendar.  It is supposed to be an alternative calendar that is totally secular and based on a year with 13 months, with each month having 4 weeks, exactly, in it.  (Wait. That is 52.) It remains the same from year to year.  Every year, the days of the week fall on the same dates--every year starts on a Saturday and ends on a Friday.  Every month starts on a Saturday and ends on a Friday. There are leap years but when they occur, the added day is not a weekday.  The day of Winter Solstice is the same way. It is not a weekday. I don't know if that makes things sort of like a backwards traversing of the International Date Line, or not.

It is slightly more accurate and more commonsensical than the Gregorian calendar we now use, and has the added advantage of making it easier to think about dates. At least, I think it would, once I got used to it.

There is a website about it here.

It means your birthday will be on the same day of the week forever.  Mine would be on a Monday. The only flaw I see in it is not actually in it, but in the decommissioning of the Gregorian calendar, with all its quirks, that we have come to know and love.  Probably most disquieting, the weekdays would lose their sequence with what we now have.  Sabbath-based worship would not be considered, and the "Sabbath" as recorded and maintained throughout history, would sort of progress through the new order of weekdays, like, hmm, the Sabbath falls on a Wednesday this week. But, it is a secular calendar, so, there you go.

Is this a good idea?