comments elsewhere

Bertrand Russell: via Jac

"When the public cannot understand a picture or a poem, they conclude that it is a bad picture or a bad poem. When they cannot understand the theory of relativity they conclude (rightly) that their education has been insufficient."

There is always the possibility, when one views a picture or reads a poem, that it is actually crap. With science, findings are published in peer reviewed journals and include methods, data and calculations to justify the conclusions. You can review their logic or even repeat their experiments. It makes sense to trust science more than art.

This is not to say that Russell doesn't have a point. It is just that great science should (if things are working correctly) always be recognized. The process holds findings up to objective scrutiny and so it will be accepted or rejected quickly. Great art may not end up being appreciated in its time and this is due to the fundamentally subjective nature of art.

End of vacation, lack of ambition

I did actually work a couple of days in the last two weeks, but it feels like a solid and long vacation. The thing is, that at the start of it you are pumped with energy and want to accomplish as much as you can each precious day. By the end of it, either due to having got every thing done already-or just fatigue, you can spend a whole day doing very little.

For instance: Today.

Pretty much all I did was go and ski/sled/dig in the snow with my daughters in the front yard of our house.

It is time to get back to work. Once time is short again I will come to value it and thus want to squeeze as much out of it as possible.

Catchy tune from a hot young talent

First day of the year--4 full dishwasher loads run

The first load, started around breakfast, shouldn't really count since the machine was pretty full from the night before.

The next load was mostly from early dinner prep: Vaishali made blondies, got a chicken in the oven to roast, set-up but didn't cook some stuffed mushrooms, started to simmer a pot full of marinara sauce with meatballs and some hot Italian sausage and I got a batch of bread dough going.

The third load was mostly dishes from dinner--there were 10 of us, so that is a lot of dishes, cups and dessert plates.

The final load was sent on its way just before bed and had remaining stuff from earlier plus the bowls and so forth associated with pineapple upside down cake. The cake was a last minute save: When I decanted it, it was still uncooked batter on the underside. I figured there would be no risk in putting the uncooked thing (on its metal platter) back into the oven. It firmed-up nicely and tasted pretty good, even though the careful arrangement of pecans, pineapple and cherries was destroyed.

D'Oh! or looking at it on the bright side...

At the new year's party we went to last night, everybody seemed really down on 2008. We didn't talk politics, but I know they are all Democrats so you would think they would be pretty happy.

Mostly the grousing was about 401K accounts loosing tons of value. I was the oldest person there and I am around 30 years away from retirement, so these accounts have lots of time to recover their value. In the mean-time, all money being put in is buying stocks at a much better price than last year.

What was kind of a damper for me personally, was that I ran one of our cars into another of them at the top of our driveway. It was dark, there was 8 inches of unploughed snow, the driveway is long, narrow and steep and you need to go up straight then turn suddenly at the top. Looking on the bright side: The most dented car already looked like crap because it has 105 thousand miles and is pushing 12 years. Also, it happened in 2008, so I can file it away as last year's stuff and put it behind me.

In what may well be the final post of the year...

Thanks for my 4 readers, maybe in 2009 I will pick-up a 5th.

I pledge to try and post in 2009 more than the 368 times I did in 2008, though I have kind of run out of things to write about.

Oh yes! I will spend my leap-second thinking about this:

He is nigh-invincible.