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unreasonable smallness
Friday, April 8 2016
This morning's walk went through the abandoned go-cart track (now completely snow-free) and then homeward along the plateau as always, and as usual I stopped somewhere along the way not far from home to cut down a smallish skeletonized tree, cut it up, and schlepp it home. In this case the tree was a Red Oak (it had still-living siamese twins coming from the same stump). There was more of it than I could carry in a single load, and when I weighed what I had carried, it came to 73.75 pounds of very dry ready-to-burn wood.
Later this afternoon, I set out with a handtruck to bring home some of the pieces I'd bucked up yesterday in the forest just west of the Farm Road. That load came to 94.25 pounds (it would have been 108.65 pounds, but a big piece proved full of torpid Carpenter Ants).
David had invited me over to Susan and David's house for dinner, and the plan was to sneak Neville over there to see how he interacts with Olive and Darla (who have had a blood vendetta with Ramona and Eleanor for nearly two years now). After feeding all my dogs, I took them on a walk in the nearby forest and then did my best to sneak Neville into the car. I distracted Ramona with one hand while Neville leapt into the car. He has never required any encouragement to get into a car.
When I arrived at Susan & David's place, David was just leaving to pick up pizzas from Catskill Mountain Pizza. Susan had me go out to her studio to introduce Neville to Olive, and that went really great. I also got the chance to see a couple dozen small partially-completed paintings for an upcoming show in Chicago. The subsequent meeting with Darla went okay outside, but once indoors, Darla started snarling at Neville, who was being utterly inoffensive. So Susan locked up Darla in the house's one functional bedroom for awhile.
Everything in Susan and David's house always seems provisional, and it shouldn't've been a surprise when we ate the pizzas on a makeshift plywood table in the kitchen. The big normal pizza was topped with banana peppers and mushrooms, and the smaller spelt (which I'd specifically cautioned against, mostly because of its unreasonable smallness) one was even yummier and had banana peppers, garlic, and artichokes. Not all pizzas from Catskill Mountain Pizza are good, but evidently the stoned teenagers who work there were having an on night.
Susan let Darla out again and she settled down on the couch, vaguely tolerating Neville from six feet away (which is better than this sounds at first blush; he was on her favorite dog bed). Conversation spent some time on my new job as a web developer for a Los-Angeles-based animal rights organization, but then moved on to such topics as social anxiety, the medications prescribed to address it, the medications prescribed to address attention deficit disorder, and how I've been using such medications to "get shit done," the ever-present risk of addiction, and what if anything our family's history can warn us about that.
Back at the the house later tonight, I watched the final part of a Nova episode about mathematics, and when it got to a discussion of the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," I was delighted that just as some part of my mind was raising the counterargument planted by Stephen Wolfram in his deeply-flawed-but-brilliant book A New Kind of Science, Wolfram was briefly shown making the argument that perhaps the only problems science wants to study are the ones easily modeled by math.
I was much less impressed by the next Nova I watched, the episode about advances in robotics. I have a fair amount of technical knowledge regarding both computer software and materials science, and I don't think it was unfair of me to be dismayed when "programming" was described as writing instructions in an English-like language that ultimately becomes "ones and zeroes." If you're not going to even bother to mention the programming language of the code in question, why bother with the mention of "ones and zeroes"? That same amount of time could have been better spent on the fundamental importance of logic and switches. It's true that ones and zeroes play a role in computers and robotics, but most of the time that's a level of non-abstraction that even programmers don't have to deal with. Later in the same show, while the term "soldering" was being mentioned in the voice over, we were shown the process of welding. Did this episode really have to be so unnecessarily vague and even plainly wrong? There are kids out there whose only source of science education is Nova, and they deserve better. It's bad enough that it's passing through a Koch-brothers filter (as is, I was disturbed to learn on the drive over to Susan and David's, Marketplace).
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