This photo shows the pattern traced in sand by a pendulum during the earthquake that struck near Seattle a couple of weeks ago. The story is told on the Web site of Gaelic Wolf Consulting. Despite having 2 Port Townsenders on my LJ Friends list, I learned about this from the weblog of Andrea Frick in Germany. What's up with that, guys? :)
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... or, "Technical Discussions that Go Over my Head".

I was just reading about the XML markup language, and in a post to xml-dev I saw this (emphasis added):The features of the tools to manage XML applications are more important to understand than the specification because of the need to validate. That brings up the subject of the number of ( Read more... )

I was looking at some books of work by sculptor Andy Goldsworthy today.

Here's one of his pieces, from a website at Hamline University called "Self Expressing Earth".
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Here are some good collections of Japanese-style poetry, which I saw in a bookstore on Monday:Kenneth Rexroth (1955). One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. New York: New Directions, 140 p. [$9.95 softcover] -- presents 100 poems, spanning centuries, in romaji with English translations. Amongst books I've seen of the same type, so far this one has ( Read more... )

There was an amazing halo around the moon this evening. It was about 20 times the diameter of the moon itself, and brightly lit against a black sky. The central part was bright silver, but most of it glowed in colors that seemed to progress through the spectrum twice before fading out at the edge.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (born January 15, 1929)

You are what you eat:
(for Sunday the 14th)
maple candy
cheese tortellini soup with chicken and vegetables
a lasagna-like casserole
orange sherbet in orange juice
vanilla-and-chocolate sandwich creme cookies
orange juice
Cornish pasty
mince tart

My excuse for not keeping my journal updated this month will be ... the new 10-part documentary Jazz, which is being shown on public TV over 3 weeks, starting last night.

Following today's LiveJournal discussion of the first installment, I helped blackhellkat start a jazz club. She's taking the reins, and I don't plan to play an important role in ( Read more... )

You ask why I live
alone in the mountain woods.
I smile and stay quiet
till even my soul is still.
The peach-trees put blossoms forth.
The brook water flows.
I dwell in another world,
which no person owns.
(For more information, see my previous entry.)

Since Yule, I've been trying to learn a little about some poets well-known in Zen circles. So far, the ones I've found a particular affection for turn out to have been outcasts. They were important even in their own time, but their manners and ideas were so far outside of the mainstream that they couldn't make a decent living for most of their ( Read more... )

Some years are better than others. 2000 was the year when Time magazine ran out of influential people to feature as "Person of the Year".

In fact, the year's most memorable victories were the ones in which the winners were awarded nothing:

• Andreea Raducan winning the overall women's gymnastics competition at the Sydney Olympics
• Al Gore defeating ( Read more... )