Better Angels

  This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

I've just recently finished Steven Pinker's new book The Better Angels of Our Nature. This is a large book covering what many people may feel to be a mythological topic. The subtitle is “Why Violence Has Declined”. Yes, violence has indeed declined. 

Little Fuzzy

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

There is a mathematical concept called “fuzzy sets”. Normally in mathematics (or logic) an object either belongs to a set, or it does not. If we talk about (counting) numbers the concept of an even number is precise enough that a number either is even or it isn't. But in everyday thinking we are constantly dealing with things that aren't so simply categorized.

Happy Birthday Woody

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

On July 14^th 1912 Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Okemah Oklahoma. Now virtually no one knows him by that name. We just know him as Woody. Every year on the weekend closest to his birthday, there is a folk music festival held in his old home town. This year was the 15^th annual Woodyfest. The festival celebrates Woody's life and music. And I was lucky enough to get to go again this year.

Lucky 10,000

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

Recently the web comic xkcd (xkcd.com/1053) had a comic about things “everyone knows”. There are so many things that we think “everybody knows” it can be easy to be surprised when we run across someone that doesn't know. For example everyone knows what happens when you put Mentos in Diet Coke. 

Tripping Through Time

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

We are all the product of our times and cultures. But our ability to read and write, both history and fiction, gives us the opportunity to look back at other times and cultures. The presuppositions we have come from our culture, but these are always in flux. There is a constant struggle between change and stasis. 

Patris Dies

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

 

Sometimes I seem to have vast holes in my memory. But with Father's Day coming up I've been thinking back to some of the events my Dad and I have shared. My Dad has always had a wide variety of interests. And he helped me develop my wide variety of interests too. 

Venus Transit

The Transit of Venus took place June 5th. A transit is where a planet goes between its star and the observer. So Venus was going to go between us and the Sun.

I still had available the solar observing telescope that was used for the eclipse a couple of weeks ago. This time set up in my backyard here in Tehachapi.

The transit started in the mid afternoon and continued through early evening. The usual Tuesday Poetry group gathered in my backyard and watched the transit. Then went inside and created poems inspired by the event that won't be seen again until 2117.

Here is an image of the transit, projected through the telescope onto the white metal screen of the solar observing system. The black dot on the image of the Sun is Venus.

 The citizen science group planethunters.org uses changing light levels as a way of detecting transits of extra-solar planets, that is, planets around other stars.