The Windmills of Certainty

It's a strange time in my life. I'm going to be moving back to CA to be around family. I think I'll feel relieved in the end. Fortunately I still have work and Galapagos is getting some momentum, so that's encouraging. I'll have more time to focus on Galapagos and other ventures. I blog like this mostly for myself, truly. I don't really promote this blog at all, except when I want certain content not scraped by LI spiders and such.  These posts help me reason about certain subjects out loud. I don't track metrics, etc. So when I do share on LI I know the people that comment actually read the content and not just the post text.  It's a Friday  It'll take me a week to get it altogether, close the door on WA for a while, and reopen the one that's in CA.   Life has an odd way of repeating itself. Or maybe it's just me and my patterns. Maybe a bit of both.  I honestly don't know. But I am looking forward to being around some family again. I

E very so often, I get in these contemplative moods, where I attempt to merge the writing styles of Eco, Tom Robbins, and Richard Feynman into a conceptual goo to coat the veneer of consciousness itself, in an attempt to expand it. But, I surmise for some, this is just word salad left out to rot in the UV rays emanating from the solar disc that helps life perpetuate itself. It’s not just the light that is cast upon us something resembling wisdom, but the shadows that get cast upon the heart. Maybe this is brooding... S t. Augustine is a particular “hero” of mine. I’m not keen on hero worship, but hero respect, for one of the greatest evils is the tyranny of should, a.k.a., fanaticism. But, I do have a relic of him given to me by my mother. I bring up Augustine because here was a man – at least until his conversion to the faith after reading the biography of St. Anthony of the Desert – who was a chronic narcissist. In his teenage years, he is what we would call today a sexual addic

The beauty of having an orphan blog is that occasionally it can act as a sounding board to one's own private conversations with the self. I am honestly getting tired of LI. Yet, like an addict I visit it everyday, read "stuff," and then launch into diatribes inspired by my father, who would often say, "Short words move men." He has a reverence for Churchill. It's been a difficult thing to navigate the world, to make choices that improve not only my well-being but for that of others, too.  I haven't grown so much disillusioned as I have been feeling like I am merely absorbing the disillusionment of others. There are plenty of stories out there attempting to reform the dark underbelly of life by only shining a light on it. Few provide options. It's a lot of bitching and moaning. Guilty as charged. So now I am trying to follow people who create things either in Art or Science. Though I was at the Engineering School at Cornell, if I had to do it all over

T his blog post is about my time in MMORPGs, particularly Lineage ][ and World of Warcraft. These two games are very similar, but also very different, due to the mechanics present in each game. I’ll start the half-sordid tale. I ’ve been on computers since I was 4 years old. My parents read some book that I cannot remember, but the advice given in the late 70s was to get your kid(s) on computers ASAP because they were the future. Few get predictions right, but this one was. My parents went and bought a Texas Instruments computer where I learned how to program in Turtle Geometry. I was programming little Turtle scripts to draw stars and other shapes in patterns. I also made a little game with my father who helped me build a Space Invaders type game. I also played a lot of arcade games in Eugene, OR which had a business where you pay for time and don’t need quarters. My father took me there about once a week for about 2 hours at a time, where time melted away while I was smashing butto

R eading The Inferno can be either very interesting or very confusing. I never read it in the context of an academic course, to tear apart the meaning behind Dante's visions. However, I have read it through the lens of being a Catholic at Heart, meaning I have tried to discern the spiritual message in his work. At the very beginning, after Dante is ruminating about finding himself lost in the middle of his life, we find him encountering three beasts who guard an alluring path, after finding his way out of a thick, dark wood. But Dante feels and knows this path is where "no one ever left alive." The leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf; all are avatars for the three most deadly self-medications people use to manage their life on their own (Catholics call them sins): anger, pride, and lust.  Now in Catholic lore, pride is the worst of them all, because it is the hook into all the other sins. Pride fuels one to indulge in "disordered love" as Aquinas calls it. But

I'm working on building a little video (still!) to explain how I came up with a method that borrows a bit from recursive function theory to build a method for generating pi by iteratively building a recursive method, which morphs at first, and then eventually stabilizes to generate an n sided polygon. As each iteration goes forth, n increases, doubling the number of sides of an n- sided polygon, until the sides get so small that it "smooths" out the perception of a circle - which is interesting because after the 5 th iteration, the function "stabilizes", and smooths out, making the incremental change between values of pi get smaller, but pi itself gets more precise to the "true" value of pi itself. The problem with this method computationally is that computers start "blowing up" because the sides approach a value of 0, but cannot actually get there. But, from a computer's point of view, these sides might as well be zero. The sides