(no subject)
Tonight I glimpsed the glow of the moon behind the mountain, and so stayed to watch it rise.
I was stupid with my mandoline this evening and cut my finger while cleaning it. Stupid, because I was careless and did not think about how close my finger was to the blade. I'm lucky it wasn't a worse cut. It is sore and gooped up with superglue now, so I can shower without reopening the wound.
After a couple of months worth of craziness--between sesshin (zen retreat) and the holidays and illness, I was finally able to do some baking again today. Lovely cookies comprised mostly of sugar and butter . . . and sugar. And some flour and nuts. But mostly sugar and butter. I hope the buddhists will be pleased, since I'm taking them to meditation tomorrow morning.
I finished Anathem a little over a week ago. I was somewhat disappointed in the ending. The excitement and intensity of the tale reached a peak and was suddenly deflated about forty or so pages from the end. Still, it was a very enjoyable read, and I don't know how else it could have ended. The difficult thing about writing such a complicated story is tying up all the loose ends--especially if the story is the sort that would fail if the ends were not addressed. Stephenson is not Murakami, and so cannot leave his threads dangling artfully, like erratic fringe at the end of an exquisite scarf.
(Speaking of scarfs (scarves?--Firefox chooses not to correct me on either spelling . . .), the one I was knitting is completed, and in the hands of its new owner. I think it was a success, but it's hard to tell, since the person had never owned, much less worn a scarf before! Imagine my perplexity in having to show them how to don it properly.)
From reading fictional accounts of quantum and poly-cosmic theory, I've returned to reading about the real thing. A few years ago, I purchased The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, all about the developments in superstring theory, but I never managed to slog past the first one-hundred pages, in which is reiterated the theories of special and general relativity, the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, and the difficulty in bringing these two theories of the universe together into a single framework. Don't get me wrong--the material is fascinating to me--but I've always found it to be difficult to wrap my head around the oddities of relativity, much less the bizarre quirks of quantum theory. Each time I picked up the book before, I would read twenty or so pages, get dizzy, and have to put it down for a few hours--or months--merely to digest what I had read. Last night, I decided I would start again from the beginning, thereby reviewing all the material that I had read before, and have now finally progressed to the section that begins to talk about string theory. It is my hope that I will actually finish the book this time, but it's possibly that string theory might boggle my mind back into dizziness.
I know that NOVA created a special based on the book. Maybe it would benefit me to watch it.
Toogie just perched herself on my lap. Is it humanly possible that I could love these kitties more than I do? I think not.
I was stupid with my mandoline this evening and cut my finger while cleaning it. Stupid, because I was careless and did not think about how close my finger was to the blade. I'm lucky it wasn't a worse cut. It is sore and gooped up with superglue now, so I can shower without reopening the wound.
After a couple of months worth of craziness--between sesshin (zen retreat) and the holidays and illness, I was finally able to do some baking again today. Lovely cookies comprised mostly of sugar and butter . . . and sugar. And some flour and nuts. But mostly sugar and butter. I hope the buddhists will be pleased, since I'm taking them to meditation tomorrow morning.
I finished Anathem a little over a week ago. I was somewhat disappointed in the ending. The excitement and intensity of the tale reached a peak and was suddenly deflated about forty or so pages from the end. Still, it was a very enjoyable read, and I don't know how else it could have ended. The difficult thing about writing such a complicated story is tying up all the loose ends--especially if the story is the sort that would fail if the ends were not addressed. Stephenson is not Murakami, and so cannot leave his threads dangling artfully, like erratic fringe at the end of an exquisite scarf.
(Speaking of scarfs (scarves?--Firefox chooses not to correct me on either spelling . . .), the one I was knitting is completed, and in the hands of its new owner. I think it was a success, but it's hard to tell, since the person had never owned, much less worn a scarf before! Imagine my perplexity in having to show them how to don it properly.)
From reading fictional accounts of quantum and poly-cosmic theory, I've returned to reading about the real thing. A few years ago, I purchased The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, all about the developments in superstring theory, but I never managed to slog past the first one-hundred pages, in which is reiterated the theories of special and general relativity, the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, and the difficulty in bringing these two theories of the universe together into a single framework. Don't get me wrong--the material is fascinating to me--but I've always found it to be difficult to wrap my head around the oddities of relativity, much less the bizarre quirks of quantum theory. Each time I picked up the book before, I would read twenty or so pages, get dizzy, and have to put it down for a few hours--or months--merely to digest what I had read. Last night, I decided I would start again from the beginning, thereby reviewing all the material that I had read before, and have now finally progressed to the section that begins to talk about string theory. It is my hope that I will actually finish the book this time, but it's possibly that string theory might boggle my mind back into dizziness.
I know that NOVA created a special based on the book. Maybe it would benefit me to watch it.
Toogie just perched herself on my lap. Is it humanly possible that I could love these kitties more than I do? I think not.