Don't believe the “polymath|flibbertigibbet” label that you see above in this blog's header graphic? Check this out: I recently found out about The Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge and within a week had invented a new game and submitted it for consideration in the competition. Read about my game, Venn's Revenge , by clicking here or by clicking on the “Venn's Revenge: The Game” link in the sidebar.

The established pattern of my thought processes is that I get funny notions into my head and sort of let them stew in there for a while, for no apparent reason and with no obvious trigger. Such has been the case with what I present today. This won't be structured and it likely won't be pretty. Think of it as a philosophical doodle—just a sloppy sketch that may or may not contain a kernel of something worth pursuing in a more formal structure at some point. ----- Based on what we generally know about physics [not including quantum mechanics, which very few of us have any reasonable conception of], it seems to me that a perfectly sane person might reasonably conclude the following: If we could accurately model the position, spin, direction, and velocity of every particle in the universe at any given moment, it would be theoretically possible to plug that data all into an imaginary supercomputer and predict with perfect accuracy the exact state of everything at any future poin...

A longtime friend (who also recently said something that made me think that "longtime friend" is sometimes more politic than "old friend") recently reminded me of an idea that has been amusing me (in a low simmer sort of way) for the last couple of years: Cogito ergo possum. I'm sure my dear readers are all familiar with Descartes' famous assertion: Cogito ergo sum. (I think; therefore I am.) Likewise, I'm sure that most of you are familiar with Watty Piper's The Little Engine Who Could , who famously asserted, "I think I can." By mixing the two together, I came up with the following hybrid: Cogito ergo possum. [Note: I'm not fluent in Latin and I am not a qualified translator. But I managed to cobble this together, and I don't think it's ineptly worded.] The resulting phrase translates to: "I think; therefore I can." Searching the internet, I quickly learned that I was not the first to devise the phrase. In fact, i...

I suppose in some sense, one could argue (if one were so inclined) that my photography constitutes a sort of ongoing art project. I would not. Likewise, I suppose my monthly documenting of my hair's growth could be described as a sort of art project. I would not describe it so. One might (as a stretch) claim that my t-shirt designs from last summer (none of which sold, sadly enough) could be considered a sort of an art project. Again, I would make no such claim. Instead, I would assert that I haven't really made any efforts in terms of starting an art project in a very, very long time. This is sad, as I used to think I might try to make a profession of art. Pessimism, lack of self-confidence, laziness, the need to pay the bills...all of these things ended up putting the goal of producing something artistic on the back burner. I intend to finally get around to changing that, at least a little. Presenting my seventeenth New Year's Resolution of 02009: I resolve to undertake s...

My handwriting is terrible. I know this. I have known it for a very long time. IN FACT, I USUALLY WRITE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS IN AN EFFORT TO INCREASE LEGIBILITY. But as anyone who knows about typography will happily tell you, legibility is actually increased by not using ALL CAPS. This is because with ALL CAPS the words tend not to have a very distinctive shape. Lowercase letters have tall parts and short parts and parts that dip below the baseline, which tends to give words distinctive shapes. I almost never use cursive. So rarely, in fact that it feels completely unnatural. Here's my fifteenth New Year's Resolution of 02009: I resolve to try to improve my handwriting. I am increasingly impressed with decent handwriting. This is particularly true of lovely cursive. My mother's handwriting is terrific. And the lady who writes out the appointment cards at my doctor's office has really beautiful cursive. Beth's handwriting is vastly better than my own, and I am a bi...

Surely there are people who spend their time trying to devise neologisms (new words or expressions). I suspect that there is a whole subculture of these linguistic hobbyists. I think it's fair to say that the most blatant (and for a time, the most famous (and possibly the most prolific)) of these neologists in recent memory was Rich Hall. His "sniglets" (words that don't appear in the dictionary but should) were featured for a time on Saturday Night Live and he published a few volumes of them, which I believe were bestsellers. [Note: Hall was a cast member of Saturday Night Live during at least one of what I think of as "The Forgotten Years". In recent years, when I have sporadically caught reruns of SNL on E! , I don't believe I have ever seen one of the episodes from this era rerun. These were actually my favorite SNL years (probably more than for any other reason because they're the years when I started watching, and they therefore have a real...

First, Michael Phelps was spectacular. There's no denying that. What he did was amazing. Congratulations to him and his teammates. (Note: The most impressive moment of all of the swimming events that I saw was Lezak chasing down and passing Bernard in that 4 x 100 m freestyle relay.) However, given the coverage and praise that has been heaped upon Phelps, Usain Bolt has not gotten nearly enough attention in the television coverage here in the U.S. Once again (as happens every time the Olympics comes around), I am reminded that our televised Olympics coverage really is way too America-centric. I wonder what the coverage in Jamaica has been like. I hope Bolt has been getting his due there! Unfortunately, it seems that half the commentary I have heard about Bolt has been disparaging remarks about his poor sportsmanship (exuberance) and showboating (premature celebration) . I feel somewhat cheated by not seeing what he would have done in the 100 m if he had really given it his all. B...

or: If I'm Destined to Get a Pulitzer Prize for 02008, This is the Line of Thought That Will Earn It For Me I'm pretty sure that it's been at least two decades since the idea of The Bell Ringer Joke started knocking around in my head. (I've mentioned the joke in a previous blog post .) There has been hope and despair, laughter and great disappointment, spread out over more than half my lifetime! On Thursday morning, out of the blue, I had a few epiphanies regarding the joke for all of these years. Epiphany #1: The first and second parts of the joke are spectacular, and if I had not been told at the time that I first heard them that there was a mysterious third part floating about in the ether, those two known parts would have been deeply satisfying. There would have been no disappointment associated with The Bell Ringer Joke whatsoever. The two parts stand together as a complete and brilliant story, riotously funny. Which is to say that the third part is only relevant...

Oftentimes, it is a mystery to me why my brain goes off in a particular direction. I have written before, on this blog, about having read an interesting book entitled The Clock of the Long Now . Having read that book is the reason why I try to use a 5-digit year in writing dates (for example, 02008 instead of 2008). It's a technique for trying to train myself to think on a longer term time scale. To think in terms of millennia instead of decades or centuries. I haven't yet fully trained myself on the 5-digit years (which is why sometimes I'll post a blog entry that mentions a 4-digit year and then go back and edit it afterwards--and I suspect there are times when the 4-digit year has simply slipped past my notice). Anyway, I've recently been thinking about nuclear power, but I've been thinking about it with that "long now" mindset. So, where previously I had mostly taken the view that nuclear power is actually a good idea (better for the environment than b...

Here are the hair photos I shot on May 2. Sorry they're so late to be posted. I have been terribly busy, and I have been having and trying to fix some technical issues on the blog. This partially has to do with my porting of the host, and partially (I think) with a glitch in Blogger's software. Anyway, here are the photos. Enjoy. (And I aim to get the June photos up much closer to the start of the month.)

1) I discovered the other day that the car dictionary does not include another of my favorite words: Luddite . Beth was unfamiliar with this word. (She claimed it was a fake word, just as I claimed that bumf was a fake word when she first introduced me to it. I have since come to greatly appreciate it.) 2) Part of me wonders whether I should provide definitions for the words in question here in my blog. More of me thinks: (a) You're reading this blog on the internet, where information is always available to you. You can find it yourself with a few mouse clicks and keystrokes. (b) Maybe if you don't know any of my test words, you'll check your own dictionary (or dictionaries, if you have multiple). Maybe you'll get your own ire up if you discover that the dictionary you've trusted for years is really quite inadequate. I'll admit that there may be nothing terribly outrageous about a dictionary's editors choosing to omit anhedonia . On the other hand, I can...

Well, of course it's been a lot longer since my last post than I ever intended. In case you were on the edge of your seat, you have my apologies. I think what I need to do is to start actually making time to blog instead of what I've been doing: merely hoping to find time to blog. If I wait for the time to arrive, it slips by, as there's always something that seems more pressing (even if that "something" amounts to nothing more than trying to reduce my sleep debt). The day after my last post, the new issue of Make magazine arrived in my mailbox. This, of course, thwarted my efforts to quickly get through that Scientific American special issue that I mentioned in my last post. I highly recommend picking up the Scientific American issue, as it's fascinating. But I recommend taking a look at Make , even more strongly. When the fourth issue came out, I didn't think it was possible to produce a better issue of a magazine. Since then, I've been astonish...

While I was on my lunch break from the book store today, I wandered over to the Periodicals section, thinking that I would track down one of those magazines about living off-the-grid (power-wise, not technology-wise) and browse through it. [I'm terribly interested in the possibility of setting up a windmill for home electricity use, or possibly putting up a solar panel on the long south-facing side of our roof.] I got sidetracked, however, as my eye was caught by a special edition of Scientific American , devoted to the topic of time . I flipped through it a bit and I bought it. It seems like a very interesting read from what I've seen so far. I'm going into it with my own preconceived notions. Chief among them, time always moves forwards, never backwards. What happened already has happened and will forever be in the past. It is not possible to go back to before a previous occurrence. Reading this magazine may turn out to dispel these notions. I doubt it, but I'm keepin...