|
|
|
Dianee has run of the house
Sunday, May 6 2018
[REDACTED]
Today was cool and dreary, though I nevertheless went out to the nascent screened-in porch, set up some ladders, and made some basic measurements to get a sense of what sort of roof slope I could plan for. It was looking as though, unless I wanted to make the lowest part of the roof cut into the eight-foot-high space of the porch, I was going to have to settle for a roof drop of only about two feet across a horizontal distance of 12 feet. 1:6 seems kind of shallow for a climate with so much snow.
Meanwhile, with Gretchen working all day at the bookstore, I decided to give tiny Diane the Kitten complete run of the house. As have many cats before her, she quickly decided that the laboratory was the place to be, and she spent a fair amount of time sleeping on the ottoman as I made very efficient use of my time to produce some useful (and highly generic) PHP and Javascript code.
I climbed into bed relatively early with my laptop and read various things, including a delightfully technical (but also at least somewhat insane) obituary for Moore's Law. That article made a convincing case that with the end of Moore's Law, perhaps exciting new computer technology can be developed with the knowledge that it won't soon be rendered irrelevant by advances in brute-force calculation with Von Neumann computers.
I've also been interested in the state of the art in the understanding of the "genetic" evolution of languages, particularly Proto-IndoEuropean (and the languages it replaced in Europe). In looking at a comparative vocabulary of various IndoEuropean languages, I noticed that both Germanic and Slavic languages did not use the IndoEuropean word for "bear" (which is similar to the Greek word "arktos"). The word for "bear" was taboo to both groups, as bears were the most fierce and dangerous creatures of the land in which the Germans and Slavs dwelled. In Germanic languages, the word for bear came to be "the brown one." I knew that the Slavic word for bear is "medved," and it turns out this means "honey-eater."
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180506 feedback
previous | next |
