The temperature hit a low of 4F (that’s -15C if you live in a country with a sane measurement system) last night, and the high today was barely above 10F/-12C. This makes it easily the coldest day so far this season. We happened to have our monthly delivery of bottled water today, and it was partly frozen:
Category: Uncategorized
General blog stuff.
11/11/11
Yes, this is my obligatory wow-what-a-silly-date post. I am fond of mathematics, though, so it can’t be resisted. The date 11/11/11 rolls around only once every 100 years so I fully expect that I won’t blog about it again. Given that nobody could have anticipated blogging, or the technology behind it, on the last 11/11/11, I won’t even attempt to guess how humanity will communicate on the next 11/11/11. (Consider, for instance, that television is less than 100 years old, transistors are a little over 50 years old, and microprocessors are just under 40 years old.)
Snow, and Snow Again
Since I try to keep track of such things, I should mention for the record that Boulder got its first snow of the season on the 25th of October, and more on the 2nd of November. The second storm dumped about eight inches across the city, and I think the first storm brought even more. Luckily, our power was not interrupted, but there were a number of outages in the area. Lots of trees were badly damaged by the first snowfall. We had a long and mild autumn so most trees had not dropped their leaves or even changed color much. Here’s a photo of a cottonwood that got knocked down not far from here:
In Memory of John McCarthy
This is a little strange, considering that it wasn’t long ago that Dennis Ritchie died, but I just learned that John McCarthy has died. Like Ritchie, his wasn’t a household name (unless your household happens to be full of computer geeks), but he also made a number of contributions which changed the nature of computing. He coined the term “artificial intelligence”, invented the LISP programming language, and even anticipated a number of very contemporary network-based technologies such as web-based applications and cloud computing.
Some Things Are Better Left Unexplained
These photos, for instance.
In Memory of Dennis Ritchie
Just over a week after Steve Jobs died, another extremely significant figure in the world of computing has died. Dennis Ritchie was the creator of the C programming language and a contributor to the creation of the Unix operating system. C (and its immediate successor, C++) is probably the most popular programming language of the 20th century, and has to be among the top five, so far, of the 21st. Unix (in various flavors) was the most common operating system for servers (that is, computers on which the web runs) in the 20th century and among the top three, so far, of the 21st, and is the basis of Apple’s OS X. He was also the co-author of the first book on C, The C Programming Language, known amongst geeks worldwide as “K&R” after its authors Brian Kernighan and Ritchie. My first-edition copy is still in the go-to-first section of my reference bookshelf.
Here’s Something You Don’t See Very Often
That’s the inside of a huge suspension bridge. The underside of the road itself is at the top of the photo. The two flat areas stretching into the distance are service roads and walkways. The bridge looks like this from a more common vantage point:
The first photo was taken just beyond the far side of the huge concrete structure, which must be the anchor for the mainland end of the bridge. The bridge extends from Kobe to an island, and has the longest central section of any suspension bridge. You can read about it at Wikipedia here and, if you happen to ever be in Kobe, you can go to the visitor’s center and see it from the same vantage that we did. Big thanks go to our friends the Makinos for taking us there. Sid, a professional tourist guide, really has a knack for finding interesting things to visit. Tracie and I kept having flashbacks to the bridge-crossing level in Half Life 2 while there.
Greetings from Kyoto
We’re back in Kyoto for about a week. We arrived yesterday evening (local time) and got up early today for a whirlwind trip to Tokyo to see our friend Rafael. I’m about to crash from jet-lag so I’ll just cut it short here and preset this photo of Fuji-san, shot from the window of the shinkansen on the way to Tokyo.
(Getting a photo like this is mostly a matter of luck, because the view is frequently obscured by buildings, power lines, etc. All you can do is use an auto-winder mode and hope that at least one exposure works.)
Latest Modular Origami Project
Here’s a photo of my most-recently completed modular origami project:
It’s from Tomoko Fuse’s Unit Polyhedron Origami. It’s 120 units folded from rectangles. I don’t really time how long it takes to make things like this, but figure about three minutes for each unit and about two to three hours for the assembly. Assembling it was somewhat tricky because the units were a little springy and wanted to be inside-out until I joined enough of them to form more than half of the spheroid. No, I didn’t do this all in one sitting.
New Cat Photos Online
Because the web can never have too many photos of cats, I’ve just uploaded a bunch of photos of our numerous cats to my Flickr site here. They’re not in any particular order and there isn’t any particular theme or whatever–just snapshots of the clouder taken over the last few months.
