1283: It’s a beautiful sumpthin’ sumphtin.

It’s storming in Larryville.  Kansas gives you few pluses, one of which is a really good thunderstorm.  Wicked lighting from up top on Oread;  you look out from underneath the university’s carillon and the fractal dance of lighting flicks about, tasting the earth.  It’s a transfer of information, the sky relating it’s observations, storing them in soil that’s not going anywhere for at least a quantum of geologic time.

I have numerous tasks ahead of me, and it would be nice to not have to sleep, but I think tonight I shall.  A splash of Maker’s Mark on a couple-three rocks, and the cool darkness of a corner window to settle into the storm.

This has been a very cold year in Kanza.  A very mild summer.  One of the numerous <em>doofi</em> that works in the cube next to me did cracked to his cube-mate today that he’d <em>like</em> a little global warming.  That’s <em>smooth</em>.    Meanwhile, the US Drought Monitor tells a different tale.  The fellow only votes for Republicans because everyone else is after his guns.  Oh well oh well oh well.  It’s fairly obvious that the extremely nice temperatures we’ve been experiencing here in the North’Merikun Middlebits is because <em>some other part of the world is getting borked</em>.  The atmosphere of this planet is a non-linear heat engine.   Why fuck around with chaos on that level?

Makes me glad they’ve found more ice on Mars.

The war planet sits and waits for Ambition’s children.

Meanwhile, a maniac is playing games.

So long as we have nations, it will remain that way.  I would like to see passports disappear.    We’re all gypsy’s, really, we just tend to harbor the illusion of ownership.  If it doesn’t dissolve into the Aether when you die, then you don’t own it.  Everything else is the act of being a custodian.  That’s part of why murder is so terrible.  It’s why guns need to be controlled.  Or, at bare minimum, their owners must have mandatory training and licensing to such a level that there can be no claim of accident.  At least such training would go far to reduce accidental death due to firearms, one would hope.

I find for myself then, that there are two general concepts I would like to see revised.  The first being the concept of ownership being transferred to a custodian mindset.  The second is replacing ‘theory’, in the scientific sense, with ‘model’.

Nothing pisses me off more to hear some illiterate crack “that’s just a theory.”   Like what they said just meant something.   I’m of the opinion that one’s environment goes far to shape one’s view of the world, and so a modest change of language on the part of the scientific community might do wonders for public perception of <em>what it is that science does</em>.   Nobody says, “that’s just a model”.  That would be silly.

Enough for now.

A partial list of projects ((in no particular order)):

1) Danger Bike Design—every boy needs one.

2) Short Story—some idears popped up thanks to David MacKay.  This might be the first short that a) is going to stay short and b) definitely has a theme.  I’m really quite excited to see how it turns out.

3) More pseudodesic work.  I’d also like to derive some distance formulas in spherical coordinates for space-fillers outside of the Geodesic Three:  Tetrahedron, Octahedron, and Icosahedron. I’m particularly interested in toroids, not to mention hyperboloids.

4) I’m going to go visit friends in Chicago in a couple weeks for a few days.  Get a sampling of it.

5) Maybe I’ll hang items 1-3 and just go play Mafia Wars.