Well, this is certainly interesting. I’ll kick off this sundry assortment with a diversion. Oh, look a bird!
Grammarly, not Grammarly.
Grammarly offers a free writing assistant, a plug-in, that checks basic spelling, punctuation, and grammar as you write. Given that my writing is given to breaking the rules, Grammarly also offers to clue me into my advanced yellow mistakes for $139.95/year. On a per-word benefit and an average of $11.66/month, this is probably a pretty good deal.
Oh, but what Grammarly doesn’t know. Style. Mine. Well, maybe.
My Freshman English professor had no problem with broken rules as long as they were asterisked on paper. I’d asterisk the incomplete sentences. Well, they weren’t sentences really. Phrases missing a noun. Or a verb.* And I’d asterisk sentences that kicked off with a connector.* And truth be told, although I could use a refresher on the rules, it seems like self-abuse to pay Grammarly to correct my “style”.*
Well, maybe.
Today, Grammarly suggested that the title of “I’ve been BUSY!” should be corrected to “I has been BUSY!” and I’m given to pause and consider. It would seem Grammarly has style of the “I haz cheeseburger” variety. I could get behind that. Maybe I should invest in the advanced Grammarly checker.
And while constructing the above, Grammarly reverted to “I’ve been BUSY!” as the correct form which we knew all along. We were entertained by Grammarly’s flair which was fleeting. Back to asterisks and yellow.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Anews privilege.
By “anews” privilege, I’m using ‘a’ in the ‘not’ form. Atypical is not typical like atheist is not a theist.
I missed blogging last week. Wholly immersed in things other, I traipsed and tripped through my daily adventures and didn’t really catch up on all the news that’s fit to holler until the end of the week.
The current events going on in our struggle toward a more perfect union are overwhelming — Russian influence in social media, the Mueller investigation, civil rights assaults, the Dreamer debacle, the Prescedense and the Porn Star¹ … it’s a long list.
And my life, my movements, my actions were not impacted one whit.
And that is privilege.
A rumination on Pi Day, (03.14).²
Pi (Π). Pi describes the circle, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, ≅ 3.14.
But pi’s true superpower is in getting us out of the clock-time domain and into frequency. And the frequency domain is where the magic happens.
Think of Alice through the looking glass. Pi opens a door labeled ‘Fourier Transforms’ and all the convoluted filtering functions perk up their ears and run like multiplied gazelles. Because they are.
And thanks to Pi, a mathematical constant, we have telecommunications. Just think of it. I can throw a text up and into the air and down it falls on the phone of my friend sitting right next to me.
Like magic. And no one else saw our lips move.
Just a whisper.
Wow.
But Pi doesn’t wait for anybody.
I’m not sure what that last statement means but I feel it to be true. Intuition. Pi is constant and a constant. Whether or not you find the value in pi, pi doesn’t care.
And as someone totally agog at the capability of technology, it is good to step away from Pi. From technology.
Eat some real pie.
In Men in Black II, the Young Agent K : “Pie don’t work unless you let it.”
And here is my shout out to CaityPies in Nashville, Tennessee.
Mmmmm, try pie. It doesn’t wait for anybody.
RIP, Stephen Hawking (1942.01.08 – 2018.03.14)
I miss knowing that someone so brilliant and so funny as Stephen Hawking is not with us anymore.
I need to read his books and I need to watch the movie, The Theory of Everything.
He also predicted the end of the universe recently. Thankfully on a time scale that doesn’t look to scale to us humans. We don’t need to mark our calendars. Next week is secure and scientific notation will be required to describe the time to reach zero energy.
But what if the approach to zero energy happens like the big bang?
So many questions. After the real scientists review his paper, I need to investigate. What if we drop to zero in the amount of time it took to blast it all apart into the free-wheeling solar systems and galaxies we currently enjoy? And if the stars run out of energy, whut? What about entropy? Enthalpy? Where will that energy go? Conservation. Conservation of energy.
And I remember how confused I was in Thermodynamics. Oh dear.
Stay tuned.
Or not.
Strange Bedfellows
Oh the glory of the diametrically opposed yet bedfellows!
For your consideration:
Dr. Willie Parker & Satanists
Dr. Willie Parker is an evangelical Christian who defends abortion.
And so do Satanists.
Diametrically opposed on religious beliefs. Bedfellows in women’s rights and agency over her own body.
NRA & GOP/Trump Administration
The NRA uses the 2nd amendment to defend gun ownership – “being necessary to the security of a free state.”
And the GOP & Trump are all about those guns too!
Bedfellows on gun ownership, if ever there was an administration tending towards dictatorship and a non-free state possibly requiring citizen intervention, it is this one!
Go figure.
¹ Yes, I’m capitalizing ‘Porn Star.’ If Stormy Daniels gets Prescedense OTUS out of the office, she deserves all the capitals.
² This is for the maths. And I may not have all the words right, but the poetry is there.