August 1, 2007
Anomalocaris Plush
I need one of these.
You can find it here:.
Could some kind soul first translate the Japanese to tell me how I might get it. And then, would another kind soul volunteer to get it for me?
This is one of those sine qua non of the invertebrate palaeontologist. And no wisecracks about how those words are used together. I haven't been spineless for weeks, or at least days. . .well hours. . . okay, still no wise cracks.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 6:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 26, 2007
A Few of My Favorite Things
I relish the shiny darkness of the empty in-box,
the clean, unfettered desktop
unmarred by files, uncomplicated by links
image alone and unthreatening
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 31, 2007
Is There Any Place Better Than Florida to Work?
What can you say when you go down to the cafeteria and the feature is mojo pork, black beans and rice, and fried sweet plantains? Except, perhaps, yummy. That's just one of the reasons Florida is such a fantastic place to be.
Sometimes I'm almost willing to hug Fidel for sending us so many people to diversify our population and cuisine. We're definitely better for it.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 12:18 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
November 14, 2006
Simple Pleasures
One of the things I write too infrequently about are the simple pleasures available from living in Florida that I have not encountered elsewhere.
For example, lunch today was at a small restaurant called "Q'Kennans." Q'Kennans features Venezuelan cuisine--most particularly two types of sandwiches a Patacon which is made with either green or sweet plantains as the bread, and Arepas (my favorite) which are sandwiches in which the filling is stuffed into a small corn-cake that has been split and hollowed out. The procedure itself is well worth watching and reminiscent of the actions of an oyster-shucker.
My favorite of the arepas is the Reina Pepeada which consists of a good but rather bland white-meat chicken salad stuffed into the corn-cake with about half an avocado. Usually I top this off with black beans and rice, but today I went with fried green plantains.
Such a simple and delightful lunch in a restaurant where English is tolerated, even welcomed, but certainly not the predominant part of the polyglot mix of different flavors of Spanish and Portuguese.
It is good to thank God for these simple and delightful things.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 2:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 3, 2006
For Those With Too Little to Do
This came in e-mail
On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. This won't ever happen again.
And of course, they are incorrect, but it will never again come around in my lifetime. So it is a once in a millenium "event." Perhaps I'll wait up for it. Most likely not.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 2:56 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 26, 2005
Learn New Testament Greek
Home Page of InTheBeginning.org
On-line lessons with study sheets, nice slow intro to the letters etc. May have posted this before, but it is cool enough to require another posting.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:13 PM | TrackBack
September 24, 2005
Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
Molasses Clocked at 35 MPH ... in January!
Okay, so you watch too much Food Network and you hear about things like the Boston Molassacre, in which 21 people died in a Molasses flood. It isn't funny, but there's such a surreal effect about it, I had to make it part of the blog.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 29, 2005
NUDED
Necessity
Uncertainty
Desire
Emotion
Doubt
Does anyone know to what I refer?
If I WERE you and did not know, I might go here. On the other hand, it's equally likely I wouldn't.
Yes, I have absurd little interests, but it takes the sting out of not having a life on a Friday night.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 5:58 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 7, 2005
A Mnemonic for Pi
This has been posted as a mnemonic for the digits of Pi. Somehow, I suspect that the mnemonic would be more trouble to memorize than the poem; however, the poem appears to be a very nice translation of Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite"
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 28, 2005
Hurricanes 2004
You can use this to find me in Florida. Look for the place where three tracks cross. And Ivan is a little deceptive because be caught some of the brunt of that storm on its back track as well.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 22, 2005
The Mysterious Ways of God
from The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. HudsonLastly, the cotton story shows the strange liaison among different branches of the economy, and between economics and nature. That cotton prices should vary the way income does; that income variations should look like Swedish fire-insurance claims; that these, in turn, are in the same mathematical family as formulae describing the way we speak, or how earthquakes happenn---this is, truly, the greatest mystery of all.
Mystery?--Yes and no. Mathematics is one of the ways in which we discern the organizing principle behind all creation. When these things fall together and there is no correlation among them in terms of causes or events, we begin to see the Mind of the Maker. We can deny it, if we choose--and many do. But the reality is that the thumbprint of God is on all creation if you merely look for it.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 7, 2005
"Transgressing the Boundaries"
At once the wittiest, most interesting, and most devastating attack on the excesses of post-modernism. Originally published in a peer-reviewed journal and later revealed as a hoax--I had forgotten how much I enjoyed "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Alan Sokal. An excerpt follows.
from "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"
Alan Sokal
There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics1; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility2; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''.3 It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics4; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science5; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics6; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.7
Even more amusing was its considerable aftermath, chronicled in part here. Enjoy.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Devotional Reading of H. P. Lovecraft
You may think the title above a joke, but it is not. And I right this in thanks for the kindness of the St. Blog's Community in nominating Flos Carmeli for best devotional blog. Heaven knows, I don't really deserve it--Quenta Nârwenion, Laudem Gloriae, Ever New, and a host of other deserve the recognition far more than I do. But I am very grateful, thank you. And now--on with the post.
While wasting some time indulging a vice acquired at a very young age--the reading of H. P. Lovecraft and materials inspired by him--something odd occurred to me. In the course of reading The Children of Cthulhu, an updating of the old Mythos, I recognized what I saw in these works.
H.P. Lovecraft is great Christian devotional reading because he gives the other side of the coin--what is the Universe without God? In many ways the arguments of H.P. Lovecraft and others in this realm were really the first fruits of modernism and atheism. These fruits were to develop into the nihilists, the absurdists, and ultimately the Post-Modernists. This is not to say that Lovecraft in any way influenced Beckett, Ionesco, or de Man (though some of his attitudes would have found good company in the latter). Rather, they were part of the zeitgeist, the "spirit of the times" that gave rise to these other things.
Why do I say this? Well, Lovecraft himself was a dedicated atheist. Some of his letters suggest some contempt for theism as a whole and for individuals in particular. His vision is of a world in which at any moment there can intrude utter chaos, randomness, and complete disorder. These are figured in the Great Old Ones and in the Elder Gods he conjures up in his prose. The effects of these entities are chaos, madness, and destruction for those who experience them. And yet, while the threat of universal destruction is always suggested or implied, the reality never occurs. Small townships are affected by interbreeding with the spawn of Dagon--a scientific investigation in Antarctica is disrupted by the Great Old Ones. One or two people experience the rising of R'lyeh. But in fact, Lovecraft's visitations of the Great Old Ones affect remarkably few people considering the hideous power and the great might and the eldritch evil that drips off of every page. If we bother to examine Lovecraft closely it appears that the doom visits only some.
I would suggest that these some represent those "brave" enough to cast off the bonds of traditional religion and thought and to walk without God. Lovecraft's visitations are, in fact, the vision of life without God. They spell out Yeats's famous dictum, "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." When God slides out of the picture, we slide into the madness of fallen nature. Everything is hostile and potentially deadly--the world is filled with fear and with the things that cause fear. Moreover, life does not make sense. Things intrude that make life a horror, a nightmare, lunacy. There is simply no explanation and so we run from one opiate to another seeking to dull the pain that is living in stark reality.
Now there are those who would contend that theism is a flight from that reality. But I think that theism imposes upon that reality the truth of the matter and begins to sort out that most things do make sense. There is still the intrusion of the uncertain and the insane, but not nearly to the degree that there is without God.
The horrors of Lovecraft are an acute example of writing what you know. Metaphorically, Lovecraft spelled out his horror of the world--a horror, I believe formed from his inability to believe in any connecting order, any system, any Creator.
The perils of atheism are given ample play in the works of Lovecraft and his successors, and they provide a good ground even for the Catholic artist to indulge his or her imagination. What is the world like without an underlying order--when even the law of gravity is view as a hegemonic oppressive construct? (As in the famous pastiche of Post Modernist thought-- Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity)
There is much to be gained by looking into the mirror Lovecraft holds up--do we see our own reflections, or do we see the truth and thus see the the mythos for the mask of anxiety, pain, and unease that it is? God is where you look for Him, even in those places that the authors and artists struggled most assiduously to keep Him out. After all, Art is at last, only an action of co-creation. We cannot do anything that is not already possible--we cannot create ex nihilo and so every inventive work is the artist in collaboration with his God-given talent whether or not the artist wishes to believe it.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:10 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 28, 2004
Well-seasoned Stock (Market)
That's kurtosis, which is neither ketosis, thankfully, nor kenosis.
Let's face it. One of the reasons you stop by here is that you want to see what oddity I will trot out next, what quirky thing presented itself to my warped imagination as a thing of interest.
Well today we have Kurtosis and Mandelbrot's analysis of the stock market.
from The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. HudsonStatisticians like to condense a lot of confusing information into one clear talking point, and so they have devised a single number to measure what we have been discussing--how closely real data fit the ideal bell curve. They call it kurtosis, for the Greek kyrtos, or curved. But we can think of it as how much "spice" is in the statistical broth. A perfect, unseasoned bell curve has a kurtosis of three. A hot, fait-tailed curve of the sort we have been finding would have a higher spice number, while a curve that had been boiled into a dull paste would have a lower number. According to a 2003 book by Wim Schoutens, a Catholic University of Leuven mathematician, the daily variaiton in another common U.S. stock-market index, the Standard&Poor's 500, had a kurtosis of 43.36 between 1970 and 2001. This is, by the bland standard of the statistical kitchen, a five-alarm chili. If you throw out the spiciest data point, the October 1987 crash, you still get an uncomfortably hot dish: a kurtosis of 7.17. The high-tech NASDAQ index: 5.78. The French CAC-40: 4.63. All are above the Gaussian norm of three.
Hope that whipped up the Holiday appetite dulled from too many sweets and too much turkey. Get out your stock (market) pot and boil yourself up some Kurtosis of 1987!
Posted by Steven Riddle at 1:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 22, 2004
The Tanka Psalter
I don't quite know what to make of this, but some of the interpretations are quite, quite lovely. Perhaps it would a good way to turn my own poetic endeavor.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 6:03 PM | TrackBack
June 8, 2004
Learn Latin (from a Dictionary?)
From The Commonplace Book of Zadok the Roman we find a link to Learn Latin with Father Reginald Foster. As to its efficacy, I cannot speak. As to its innovation--wonderful!
Posted by Steven Riddle at 2:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 18, 2004
A Different View of Lincoln
Via Dappled Things this, perhaps overstated, southern view of Abraham Lincoln. Summarizes a small portion of my extremely complex feelings and thoughts on the matter. But perhaps oversimplifies the point and exhibits a bit of chronological chauvinism and maybe a touch of historical revisionism of its own. But the charges require examination at least. And I'm glad someone stated them clearly.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 6:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 29, 2004
Smockmomma for President!
Hey, SHE volunteered below! And frankly looking at the vast field running, I don't see any alternative (except maybe Elinor Dashwood who evidently has already garnered a few write-in votes in previous elections).
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:04 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 20, 2004
Open Source Shakespeare
Eric Johnson, one of the Contributors to Catholic Light, has an elegant and interesting on-line project titled OpenSource Shakespeare. Highly recommended for those with an interest in Shakespeare it features a wonderful index that allows you to find all of the lines a given character in a play speaks. If you have any need of or interest in Shakespeare, this site my provide the kind of resources and information you would be interested in.
I have added Mr. Johnson's remarkable endeavor to my left-hand column so it will be readily available for the future.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:20 AM | TrackBack
December 23, 2003
One of the Great Delights of Christmas in a Heavily Latin Influenced Area
Masa Real de Guayaba--Lord, keep the calories at bay.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 3:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 15, 2003
For Future Reading
This wonderful blend of the best of H.P. Lovecraft and the worst of Jack Chick. Very nice.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 1:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack