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Often attributed to Kepler is a statement of the nature of the following. I don’t seem to have a copy of the Mysterium Cosmographicum handy, so I’ll parrot what I found at goldennumber.net:

“Geometry has two great treasures: one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.” —Johannes Kepler

I’ve always been a fan of Kepler since I was in Holland and studied 16th century science. As Sagan said, he was the last of the mathematical astrologer or the first astronomer. Either way, Kepler and his odd sense of mysticism or keen sense of science managed to produce some stunning insights about the way our cosmos works, about planetary motion, and about geometry. In the quote above he refers to the “Golden Number” or the “Golden Ratio”: phi. Kepler, and his work, for me have always been one of those historical oddities of that era where Western science looked to shake off the shackles of church dogma and mysticism and become, properly, science. More odd trivia for me to know. Until…

After having finished Trig I thought that I would like to take a look at some of the finer points of subtending space by line, so I purchased this very nice “Mathematical Toolkit” for drawing lines, arcs, etc. at the local Office Depot the other night.

I haven’t really touched tools like these since early high school when I took Geometry, so it was a bit strange to reacquaint myself with their use. Figuring out how to create phi ratios, one of Kepler’s “treasures”, seemed like an obvious enough learning task. So I did. I shot pictures of the process and now share that process with you, Internet.

I pulled out some graph paper and made a square…

And made a golden rectangle from it…

And many more from that one…

Maybe try to draw something in the space?

It’s really a pity that our math classes and our science classes don’t always align. It’s very good to have practical hands on experience of that which you seek to model mathematically.

Wow.

• Adam riding a saddled dinosaur.
• WMD’s actually being found in Iraq.
• Evolution being denied for the sake of creationism, er, “Intelligent Design”.

Welcome to Idiot America. Where intellectuals are mocked and expertise is suspicious. The organ of wisdom is the gut, the organ of elimination.

Idiot America

As a card-carrying member of the Liberal Superiority Club ( exhibit A: MacBook Pro ) I’m required to keep an open mind about things, occasionally accepting ideas or lifestyles that challenge my very assumptions about the way the world should work.

Check this out:

Wm said… Saw Kathy this past Friday in Atlanta @ The Fox theatre. She had a sold out performance and had to add an extra show afterwards. She looked fine from the 2nd row center pit which was about 10 feet from her. She kicked ass that night. All you other people can go listen to Ann Coulter…now that’s trash! Monday, August 20, 2007 1:42:00 AM

Well, no flies on you Wm for taking a dig at looneypants Coulter, but this thing you assert, that the Venn diagram of Kathy Griffin and Funny intersect, this is simply more than my mind can comprehend.

So i recited my “Ek An Car” mantra 100 times and the spirit of Krishna ( or was it Harriet Miers? ) descended upon me and reminded me that part of being an open-minded guy is accepting ideas that you instinctually disagree with and then verifying their truth for yourself.

My teeth are grit and for once I know the pain that my relatives must feel when I point out every way in which the Bush administration has been a giant leap backwards against their heartfelt belief that it just simply can’t be so. I mean it takes a lot of gut-not-brains thinking to discount so many screw-ups.

I returned to mantra recitation.

But then I remembered Margaret Cho’s movie “I’m the One that I want” which I watched on a frigid and wet night in a crappy hotel in San Jose. It was really funny. And not just because she did the Mamma Cho impersonation ( OK, lady, I agree it kills for you, but let’s not beat that dead horse into glue before it gets to the factory ). I had always found Cho absurdly un-funny, I mean, how many jokes can you hang on “I’m overweight Korean and all my friends are gay men!”? Yet this movie was fu-uh-nny.

So there may be a time and space coordinate where the Kathy Griffin and Funny convergence is to be seen, but I don’t know where it is. If, perchance that convergence were recorded, someone let me know so that I may bear the fruits of my righteous open mindedness.

Incidentally Wm’s comment above was found at an article describing Kathy Griffin and Steve Wozniak dating.

{ Post comes from after reading FSJ. I think I have a FSJ-style hangover }

As it may have stuck the regular reader, I have been up to my nose in closing out my summer school class, Trigonometry.

Walking into the final I had only three of my exam scores and the information about my in-class work.

Test 1: 92 Test 2: 29 Test 3: 90 Daily work: 15 points.

And yes, you’re reading that right, Test 2, saw me make a 29. You’ll note that I had been away on business two weeks ( Boston and SJ ) during that time thus leaving very little time to uh, well, do anything but fly home and take the test with what I happened to know based on on-the-plane readings.

I took test 4 three days before the final and thus my teacher hadn’t had time to grade it before I took the final. This meant that there were 300 points in play. Further, your lowest test score could be replaced by one half of the final’s points. Thus I knew the status of 200 points out of 500 available walking into the final. Thus I could have quite literally failed..

Or…

MATH-1316 004 Trigonometry A 3.00

Thanks be to Alberto Gonzales.

“The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.”

You may want to see Kris Carr’s crazysexycancer.

It’s the documentary of a young woman who gets word on February 14th that she has inoperable cancer. The question is, what did she do with her life after that.

What do we do with ours?

Debut’d at SXSW and previously mentioned here.

Now that I re-read the title, I’m inclined to think I should change it because this is a very bold title.

But we live in bold times, and bold times call for bold titles.

Recently I read about a “Most Influential Books” list via Daniel Miessler’s post “Episteme”. I commented that it was a bit presumptuous to believe that the reader of the 100 list would be able to get anything out of some of the selections without other key concepts and items discussed in the previous authors’ work. For example, to make sense of Hume or Berkeley, you really need to know Aristotle’s Categories and Descartes’ Meditations. The former is not singled out and the latter didn’t make the list ( cogito ergo sum doesn’t rate? ).

I gave some thought as to how I could give a rough sketch of Western intellectual development in a broad-strokes sense that worked visually. Enter FreeMind. FreeMind is a mind-mapping software ( Free! ) that exports to PDF.

So I took an attempt at producing a PDF that gives context for these books.

Here’s a sample

Full PDF Here

Where possible, I have put a number entry, which corresponds to that book’s entry in the 100 list.

For Updates / Suggestions:

• Leave comments here
  • I will make changes for errors ( Merleau-Ponty never said “changing it changes”! ) or typos
  • Splitting hairs on which school / thought line ( X was born in Romania, why listed as a German? ). Large errors, OK, but keep in mind I’m trying to frame whole books, not write the definitive history of Western Philo
  • Ditto dates. Yes Wittgenstein lived before WWII, but he also lived after. Again, I’m grouping by broad similarity, not hair-splitting difference

I hope this gets some of you reading! If you want two great Anthologies * Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, From Thales to Aristotle. Cohen, Curd, Reeve eds. Hackett press. * The Continental Philosophy Reader. Edited by Kearney and Rainwater. Routledge Press.

Yesterday Lauren and I were near the Arboretum area having a coffee at the beautiful Segafredo-backed 360 Hills Cafe on Jollyville. As hunger crept up on my lady she admitted to having a bit of a hunger for “Fresh Choice” which is a salad buffet that also sells some overcooked carb-heavy things on the side ( pasta, cardboardy pizza, etc. ).

We walked in and checked out the menu options and saw that the limitless buffet was $9 mumbledy mumble.

Nine-plus-dollars.

3 gallons of premium?

For salad?

( “You don’t put burbon in it or nothin’?” )

I appreciate that the rich eat better than the poor and that establishments like this are the barometer of that ugly truth, but ten dollars for a salad bar is just beyond the pale of good sense. Maybe this is why my very expense-conscious sister only goes for lunch.

For some of you not in flyover locales ten bucks may sound pretty reasonable for a meal, but ‘round here ten bucks will get you: - A wonderful taco plate at Kerby Lane - A wonderful chicken / salad ( fajita salad ) at The Hyde Park Bar and Grill - An asian chicken salad at the Alama Drafthouse movie theatre - A big greasy plate of something Mexican at Chuy’s - Sesame Chicken at China Café - Lot of other unhealthy stuff.

So, we turned on our heels smartly, walked over to the HEB and bought sauce, lettuce head, bleu cheese crumbles, and Bac-O’s and provelone, Duvel Golden Ale, Corn-Nuts, and french rolls. We put breaded chicken, made a parmigiana sauce, put the chicken and sauce to cook in the oven.

After it was cooked we put it on a french roll, covered with provelone and served with a salad with champagne dressing with bleu cheese.

Bill from HEB $40.00 with some premium / multi-use items in there.

And that doesn’t even top off the score: my girl and i talked and laughed as we cooked, we shared some ranch corn nuts in a decadent display of growling stomach staving off, and after a quick washing up of the plates together, we watched disc III of “Ergo Proxy” ( it gets really good there! ).

I hear that many revolutions have begun when one individual said “enough”. Not to compare this lowly servant to Rosa Parks or anything, but last night we said enough to being ripped off at dinner for decent food.

I read in a blog post about “how to save money” that every time you think about going out for food, don’t and make a great meal instead. You’ll wind up thanking yourself. Words to weigh your decisions by.

I’m not just a fanboy because my most excellent friend P-dizzle earns his daily bread on the hills of Page Mill Road, but because the virtualization software totally mega absolutely freaking rocks.

I bought their latest product, Fusion, yesteday. It’s the virtual machine platform for new Intel Macs. So on this one can run a virtual machine of Windows, and I’m currently typing this in a virtual machine of Ubuntu Linux “Feisty Fawn”.

Real reason is that I needed to figure out some magic associated with mod_rewrite and mod_proxy. For VMWare this is a snap. I created an ubuntu image, installed the necessary apache components and am now figuring out the magic. If I screw up, I roll back to the last known good checkpoint.

I was so impressed I just had to gush a little bit.

Here’s a pic of my desktop. Ubuntu, OSX, and the only thing that Windows is really good for…

Hi all,

Yesterday’s outage with respect to my domain’s registration ( turning this site into an adwords farm ) has convinced me that I need to be the owner of my domain ( indeed! ) and that I need to find a different host of that content.

Within the next few days I’m going to be moving over to a new host. If you see strangeness in that interval, that’s what’s going on. It shouldn’t last long. I was at my last provider ~ 5 years, so it’s not that common thing.