|
|
|
Javascript grapher
Tuesday, November 17 2009
This morning I had a sex dream about Angela, the uptight Christian cat collecting character in The Office. As often happens in my sex dreams, actual consummation of the dream did not occur, although it almost did. During most of the dream I remember being in a strange state where all my muscles were tensed and I was floating slightly above the furniture (this feeling is common in my dreams). Typically when I feel this way in dreams, it's a kind of deliberate paralysis, in that I feel I could break out of it at any time but simply choose not to. On awaking, though, I realized that this was probably the real paralysis that comes with dreaming, the kind that stifles muscle movements into the twitching that characterizes the dreams of dogs. I'd heard on a podcast some weeks ago that awareness of this paralysis is often interpreted as an "out of body" experience, yet it's actually a step along the way to lucid dreaming. A more familiar manifestation of this sort of thing is the experience I have of sound cutting in and out as I'm drifting off to sleep. Sometimes my brain's decision to cut off the sound signal from my ears is startling enough to reawaken me.
I applied another layer of drywall compound to the inside of the brownhouse today, eliminating nearly all evidence that the walls are actually made of OSB particleboard. I've actually become quite skilled at drywall taping, and so my surfaces are now close to smooth. But the fact of the matter is that I actually prefer a little texture to a wall's surface. I might continue with another layer or so of compound, but I probably won't end up sanding the walls at all.
Down in the greenhouse, I finally installed the second bench (running along eight feet of the north wall, starting from the west). This bench is a framework of pressure-treated two by fours with little stubby legs to keep it close to level. I'd surfaced the other bench with bluestone, but I didn't have enough large pieces to surface this second bench that way. So I used big pieces of Cor-Ten steel, that rusting steel given to me in odd scraps by that pair of photogenic vegan Buddhists who had used it as the exterior cladding for their house on Zena Road. I've been told that Cor-Ten shouldn't be used in applications where it comes into contact with treated lumber, but the treated lumber I was using was that new kind of treated lumber, the kind containing Alkaline copper quaternary. I'll have to see how compatible the two are with one another.
On the new bench, I placed one of my two dwarf banana trees as well as a new planting of lettuce in a long, narrow container (the kind used for window plantings). As additional fertilizer for the lettuce, I included perhaps of a half cup of dark coffee-colored "fecal tea" from one of the five-gallon buckets of human feces I'd collected while building the brownhouse. This is the fluid that accumulates at the bottom of any such bucket after several weeks. It looks like it would make any plant ecstatic, though it smells like rotten cabbage.
As you'll recall, I made several stabs at writing a graphing program during my idle moments behind bars over the past few weeks. Today I took some of those ideas and extended them to make an all-DHTML grapher. It doesn't yet have coordinates or auto-ranging (to determine the best scale for the display of a function), but it's pretty cool nonetheless, especially since it only uses about 35 lines of code. See for yourself.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?091117 feedback
previous | next |
