Whelp, I’ve put it off until it can be put off no more. So, to my dearest internet friends who have not yet heard, here’s what’s happening, the short version:
This afternoon, I’m getting on a plane, flying to LA, Fiji, Auckland, and finally arriving in Christchurch, New Zealand, two days from now, having skipped over the 1st of February entirely.
There is a bike waiting for me near the airport. I’ll bus and bike south, to Clinton. In Clinton I’m working on an Organic Farm, in exchange for room and board.
After a few weeks, I’ll move on to another work-for-shelter exchange.
The goal is to return, in one year, having lost only the money spent on plane tickets.
FAQ:
Why New Zealand? Because they offer a working holiday visa to US citizens. The other options were South Korea and Ireland.
How do you find people willing to host you? Help Exchange.
Are you taking your computer? Nope! I’m taking a keyboard kindle, which has free 3G. If you need to tell me something, email it. My intention, though, is to avoid the internet for a few months, and do a little thinking for myself.
What about pictures? And blog posts? I’m taking my sketchbook, and a teeny watercolor set. You’ll get to hear, and see, all about it when I get back.
What will you do when you get back? I have no idea.
Why are you doing such a silly irresponsible thing?
“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.” Herman Hesse
“The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.” Joseph Campbell
“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” Rene Daumal
“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kind of people” Mark Twain
Or maybe I’m just running away.
Love you all, and see you in a few months. -S
(Source: diiqme)
I am, once again, struck by the fact that I’m living in the future. Here’s how I prototyped a product in 14 days, while away visiting my family.
I. Find a problem.
On the 15th, I stepped on my Kindle, and cracked the screen. It’s the second time I’ve had a kindle with a broken screen.
II. Try…
I have a friend who asked for some thoughts about his drawings. It was gonna be pretty public anyway, so once I realized that I needed half a dozen pictures to make my point, I asked if I could put my reply here.
I am qualified to say things about drawing because I am mediocre. Being mediocre is the best qualification, because it means I’ve had to really work to learn to make a nice drawing. Naturally talented people make poor teachers, because they haven’t made all the mistakes. I’ve made plenty of them, and I’ll make plenty more, but I am slowly mapping the minefield. Read More
The Church of Interruption
Sometimes I am startled to realize, in the middle of a discussion, that I have offended or hurt some of the people I’m talking with.
First, know and accept this: I have a friend who is a wizard. He is an ancient and wise wizard, and we have tea together. One teatime, I mentioned my talking troubles to my friend, and he said this:
“Yes, Sam, I’ll bet it is hard for you — holding controversial religious beliefs, I mean.” *
Now, I am not a religious person; and my friend is aware of that. Not knowing where he was headed, I nodded for him to continue.
That Guy Syndrome
Hi, doc. How are you?
:::
Well, okay, I guess.
:::
Yes, it’s a professional call, but I don’t really need a diagnosis. I already know what I’ve got. It’s That Guy Syndrome, doc. I’ve got TGS, and I’m scared.
Shakespeare Authorship Haiku Challenge
My entry:
Ah -- speak, seer!
Name him, whose pen pulled
bluebottles from blank pages --
spontaneous life!
But don’t worry, you should enter even if you’re not the ULTIMATE UNIVERSAL POETRY GENIUS, like me.
(Source: diiqme)
You already know most of this, I sure. I’ll say it anyway, because saying it will help me figure out more clearly why I disagree with you. While I am confident I disagree, expressing why is verbally frustrating —- which means it’s totally worth exploring. So:
Imagine the inside of a piano: all the strings tucked in next to each other.
When you whack the middle C string, all the other strings will vibrate, sympathetically, more or less. Those that vibrate most will be the other ‘c’ strings —- the ones that naturally vibrate twice (or half) as fast. Then, there are the strings that vibrate simple fractions faster: 3/2, say. This is all just a simple, boring, physical process, right? Air is hit by one string, and hits another string. Hit that second string at the right times, it moves more. Hit it at random times, it’ll barely budge. If you made a string that vibrated 131/127ths of the speed of that C string, it would not vibrate very much at all.
Our ears (and minds) find harmonies pleasing because our ears use exactly this process to perceive sound: the sympathetic vibrations of many oscillators with different fundamental frequencies. Hearing a C vibrates C-ish inner-ear-hairs lots, A-ish hairs some, and B-sharp-sharp-ish hairs almost none at all.
But sympathetic vibration happens even if there are no ears nearby to hear, or minds to percieve.
Thats what I mean when I say that harmonics are a physical process that we happen to describe mathematically using simple ratios.
The golden ratio is neat, and it pops up a lot —- but there’s no physical process that makes it pleasing. Our eyes don’t use continuing fractions in order to see, and rectangles of varying proportions are all just rectangular if there are no eyes to see or minds to percieve.
(As an aside, the precise, physical reality of harmonics shows up in our perception of them. It did so even before we knew what harmonics were. It’s easy to hear a single hz error off of a perfect harmony, on notes that are measured in hundreds of hz.
It’s nearly impossible to notice that a proportion is only .25% away from the golden ratio.)
So the golden ratio might be the most beautiful. There might be some part of out mind that prefers 1:1.61 more than any other visual relationship. But that would be particular to the human eye and mind —- and it would have to be demonstrated that it is so. That ratio is not inherently visually more special than, say, 1:2, or 1:1, or 16:9, each of which have their one intruiging and mathemystical properties.
