Floyd’s Blog
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Moving (website this time)
The slow speed of this website has been getting more frustrating. At first, I didn’t mind it so much. We all seem to be too impatient anyway in our daily lives; maybe it was a good thing to slow down and wait a few seconds. But it seemed to get worse. I started timing how…
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The Wager (Grann 2023)
This is another book that I finished recently while moving, Grann’s 2023 The Wager. It focuses on a specific ship, the HMS Wager, that was part of Anson’s around-the-world Royal Navy voyage in 1740–1744. I heard an interview about it on the radio and was curious enough to order a copy to read. One thing…
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Romania
In addition to the US and Canada, this website has now had a visitor from Romania! One of the (perhaps) surprising things about Romania is that, despite it being situated in Eastern Europe, the language is a romance language descended from Latin and not a Slavic language as one might naively expect. Side-by-side comparisons of…
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Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky & Strugatsky 1972)
Roadside Picnic (1972 by Strugatsky and Strugatsky) was originally written in Russian in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I read the 2012 translation by Le Guin. The book is based on a cool idea. Aliens briefly visited Earth and left—leaving behind, as far as anyone can tell, some tossed-out trash. These garbage zones…
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Ancillary Justice (Leckie 2013)
My wife bought this book for me to read as a travel book during the first part of our move. This is a fun, creative, well-written space opera. The point of view is very refreshing and original. The protagonist has a pragmatic, no-nonsense approach, essentially a noir character, but also cares strongly about a few…
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Bread
I’ve never had much luck baking bread (except for cornbread or biscuits; here, I mean wheat yeast bread). I’ve tried from time to time and mostly just got discouraged by it. Both of the kids wanted to learn more about cooking, including baking bread, so we made it a week-long project. We baked a loaf…
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Canadian Wildfires
We are a long way from Quebec but have been hearing about how the smoke from the fires has been affecting the US East Coast. Last night on the way back from the grocery store, the sun was setting and it was a deep red. On the news this morning, they said the smoke from…
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Moving Update
We completed the first phase of our move with a long plane flight. It was hectic, and we were hungry, sore, and exhausted, but overall it went well. There was a chain of last-minute dramas with things being closed on Memorial Day that conflicted with scheduled dropoff times set by the company; paperwork that needed…
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Moving Preparations
We are planning to move very soon. The kids are all out of school now. There has been a whirlwind of activity in the apartment, with us packing and cleaning. We’ve lived here for years throughout the pandemic, and now it is unrecognizable, with everything moved and packed away. I am also noticing how much…
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A Fire Upon the Deep (Vinge 1992)
I just finished reading A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) by Vernor Vinge. I was curious about it because it was highly recommended, but I also (purposefully) didn’t know much about it to avoid spoilers. This contained a lot of aspects of the classic Western space opera, where an individual (possibly with superhero abilities) or…
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Updated Motion Camouflage Script
This weekend I worked on developing the “dragonfly” POV-Ray script some more. There are more details behind this idea in an earlier post. Here is the linear intercept video, without motion camouflage. You can see more movement against the background, especially in the early part. I think it helps to see this first for comparison…
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Children of Memory (Tchaikovsky 2023)
This book brings together some very big ideas, such as (I have to be a bit cryptic to avoid spoilers) how we can recognize human-level intelligence and how would we recognize fundamental physical reality versus an immersive simulation—or do these really matter? The author has a background in zoology and psychology, and it shows. I…
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Motion Camouflage
I read an article by Mizutani et al. (2003) about how dragonflies can move while appearing to be stationary against their background. I’ve been thinking this over and wanted to see if I could simulate this to illustrate it and better understand it. Usually, we think of animals minimizing motion to blend into their background.…
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Fried Cabbage
My oldest daughter wanted to know about food traditions in our family. Fried cabbage is something we used to make, and I have continued to make it at home from time to time over the years. So I made some to share the process with her. It is quick and easy to make and tastes…
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The Toaster Project (Thwaites 2011)
Excellent! This book, The Toaster Project (2011) by Thomas Thwaites, is about something I have thought about for decades. How do we make the things that we have around us? Not just putting it together from a kit but how are the parts actually made, and the tools to make the parts, and the tools…
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The Dorrington Deed-Box (Morrison 1897)
I recently finished The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897) by Arthur Morrison. It is a fluffy, easy-to-read book that will not change your life. I could see it as something to bring along to read as a diversion while on a trip or on vacation. It is written kind of like a Sherlock-Holms-type mystery, but it is…
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Not Moving to Okinawa
The last post was an April Fool’s Day post. I have traveled to Okinawa in the past, but we are not moving there. Also, don’t try to use the listed Japanese phrases. They are not correct translations—not even close. In one day, that post shot up to my most viewed post so far on this…
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Okinawa
We’re moving to Okinawa! Okinawa (沖縄) is part of the Ryukyu Islands (琉球諸島). One food that we are excited to try to grow is the (purple!) Okinawan sweet potato. They also have the Ryukyu flying fox (Pteropus dasymallus) a type of huge fruit bat. The group is known as the megabats! We got a fixer-upper…
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World Without End (Follett 2007)
I finished World Without End, the second book of Follett’s “Kingsbridge” series. While I like the historical setting, this is not really my kind of book. It contains a lot of romance plot points with love triangles (not my thing); it is also quite explicit and contains some graphic violence. The first book in the…
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Emergency Drone Deliveries
My brother sent me a link to this video. It is inspiring to see how drones are being used to deliver emergency supplies to remote hospitals in Rwanda. Some very good points are also made about not only saving time but energy by avoiding delivering things by driving a vehicle. Two issues that I wondered…
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Coin-flipping Statistics: Probability
I started to write a post that incorporated some aspects of basic statistics and it quickly blew up out of control. So, I’ve decided to break it up into a few smaller posts. This one is focused on calculating the probability of a simple outcome. If two events are independent of each other, we can…
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First Republic receives rescue deposits from other banks
I saw this in the news today. I’m not going to reiterate the details (see the news links below for those) or try to predict what will happen in the economy. (I am not predicting a crash by making a parallel to the 1929 events.) I just want to point out the similarity to an…
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This Blog at One Month
This site has been up for a month now. I’ve made 23 posts and had 28 visitors (exactly a one-a-day average) with 146 page views. The most viewed are: All of the visitors have been from the US and Canada. I also have one bona fide comment on a post, Desk Gnome, about the artist…
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Weather Spark
I was looking for information about the last frost dates and found the Weather Spark site that I thought I would share. Weather Spark has a lot of information about locations all around the world. In the plot above, you can see that the average low temperature is just now pulling above freezing but will…
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Wikimedia Commons
Another website that I want to share is Wikimedia Commons. Often I want an image to use, either at work when putting together a presentation or for other things like these blog posts. However, a lot of images are under various types of restrictions, and it can be difficult to use them without getting entangled…
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Capital Controversy
Whether or not a word is capitalized in written English is standardized for the most part. In general, this is a silly arbitrary detail that we all quickly learn in elementary school and never think much about again. However, some cases are not as clear. What at first seems like the most boring topic possible…
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Things Fall Apart (Achebe 1958)
After reading Ballantyne (1861) I was looking for a book about colonialism from an African perspective. Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe (who was Igbo and grew up in British Colonial Nigeria) is exactly the kind of book I was looking for. The book starts off by drawing you into West African Igbo (or…
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Beekeeping Video
Here is a video I saw on YouTube and wanted to share. I don’t know anything at all about beekeeping, but I have wondered about it from time to time. This video follows Alex over one year of starting beekeeping, from getting his first bees all the way to getting his first honey harvest (12…
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Boiled Dried Beans
We have a 25-pound (11.3 kg) bag of pinto beans that we have been working through. I have fallen out of practice with cooking, so today, I gave it a shot. Here is the recipe I tried. (I didn’t measure anything, so you are on your own with that.) Start the beans heating right away…
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Desk Gnome
We were playing with making some objects out of polymer clay, and I liked how this small gnome turned out. I’ve got him standing over the corner of my desk while writing this. It was very simple and easy to make, essentially five balls of clay stuck together. There was a temptation to add more…
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Kerbal Space Program
I really like this game. It is one that, kind of like Minecraft, you see kids playing with it, think to yourself, how would I do that differently? Start fiddling with it, and before you know it, suddenly, hours have gone by, and the kids have found something else to do, but you keep playing.…
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Buster Keaton—how did I miss this?
My public school education has failed me. I have heard the name Buster Keaton used from time to time and had a vague idea about him being in some old films (wasn’t it either him or Charlie Chaplin that hung off of the clock tower?), but in my last blog post, I mentioned in passing…
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Artemis (Weir 2017)
I just finished Andy Weir’s Artemis. I’ve previously read two other books by Weir, The Martian (2011) and Project Hail Mary (2021), both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. Artemis has a different feeling from those that is hard to put my finger on. It is a solid science fiction novel and is diverting. It reminds…
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This blog at one week
My new blog has been up for a week now. It has had 20 visitors (I’m guessing that means different IP addresses), almost three per day. The visitors are still limited to the US and Canada. My most viewed posts are:
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LibreOffice
Here is some software that I have been using, both at home and at work, almost daily for over 10 years now, and I am surprised it is not more widely adopted. LibreOffice is free, works across different computer operating systems, and is compatible with a wide range of file formats, including the ones found…
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Inspirational home improvement project
I found out how to embed YouTube videos in these WordPress posts (using the “shortcode” block)! Here is a video to share that I loved watching. Actually, one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. The biggest thing that was going through my mind during the video was how on earth did he…
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How to cook a pizza with a nuclear bomb
Disclaimer first: Nuclear weapons have horrible destructive power, both in the short and long run. I am in no way trying to make light of or be flippant about the range of serious problems connected to nuclear weapons. My son asked me this question, “could you calculate exactly how far a pizza should be from…
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Strawberries
Another plant that might be planted in the fall, in addition to garlic, that comes to mind are strawberries. Honestly, I have a bit of an aversion to growing strawberries. We had them in our garden for a while when I was a kid, and they seemed like they were more work (weeding) than they…
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Our Animal Memory Game
This is about a game that one of my sons and I play. We say words to each other to choose moves in a series of alternating steps. Here is an example (“M” is for my move, and “S” is my son’s move). The result is a draw; neither of us won. The trick to…
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International!
This blog has now been viewed by people both in the US and Canada! The Jetpack plugin for WordPress allows you to see summary stats like this for your site.
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Weather Underground
One thing I plan to do with this site is share other websites that I use regularly. I use Wikipedia a lot and essentially everyone already knows about it, so I feel like Wikipedia almost goes without saying. Another site that I use a lot to check the weather and get an idea of weather…
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How long is your DNA?
How long would the DNA be from a single human if all of the molecules were lined up end to end? Our genome is a little over three billion base pairs (the A,T,G,C sequence of molecular “letters” in our DNA) long (IHGSC 2004). We have two copies per cell, so that puts us at over…
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AI guiding AI: ChatGPT & DALL·E 2
After the post about ChatGPT I thought about DALL·E 2 (an AI that generates images from simple text prompts) and wondered what might happen if I combined them. At first, I made a couple of prompts to DALL·E 2 to see what it would come up with. (Most of these images are just using DALL·E…
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The Gorilla Hunters (Ballantyne 1861)
I just finished reading The Gorilla Hunters: A Tale of the Wilds of Africa (1861) by R. M. Ballantyne. It was a sequel to Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), which I had previously read. I want to write about it while the book is fresh in my mind, but this case is more difficult than…
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Setting up this site
One of the reasons I started this site is to get into a practice of regular writing and to keep a bit of a log of some of the changes we are planning this year. (How I actually end up using this site, however, remains to be seen; it might evolve in a different direction.)…
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“Meet ChatGPT: Your New Favorite AI Language Model”
I logged in to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and asked it to tell me about itself so that I could post it. Here is the result. Sure, I would be happy to help you write a blog post about me! Here’s a draft that you can modify and post online: Meet ChatGPT: Your New Favorite AI Language…
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Serpent Spear-Onions
We are planning to move later this year, and I am really hoping to be able to have a garden again. I grew up gardening, but we haven’t had one in decades because of living in apartments in cities and moving every few years (although I have always grown potted plants in our apartments). If…
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