We’re celebrating with a gardening expedition this morning. While others have sweltered, alas, we’ve basked in 72 degree days. And Jane and I are moving a little better, aggressively challenging the pain. We figure move it or lose it, and we made a major push this year, along with trying to recover order in the house this six weeks, to recover order in the garden. All four water features had developed problems. We spent a bit getting our sprinkler system (which didn’t cover areas that needed water, and threw water in a wasteful 30 foot high arc over the front yard) converted to a drip system, which delivers water to certain spots and discourages weeds in others by not providing water. Then the water features: the disappearing-water fountain in front had clogged, but miraculously unclogged when switched on, so that fixed that. The main waterfall has limped along with this stupid system of springy stiff tape mass that is supposed to supply biological action…not so sure of that. What it provided was a nest in which algae could grow. So that went. Then the real filtering filter had died (or the pump had) and needed replacement, which had to be dug into the berm, and that is being done. I also managed to get some GOOD fine filter, so life will become saner—and easier. And we’ll be able to see the fish again.
The lotus pond is leaking somewhere, and we have not been able to figure where. We may need to completely reconfigure the strip between filter and pond, with new liner. It’s leaking about 20 gallons a day. But the trees up there appreciate it. Now that we have the drip system, however, this is getting to be needful.
And we’re dieting, so no big barbecue for us. Nor likely any fireworks. I almost feel good enough to risk a walk from the parking garage to the downtown park to see the big show (our friend Joan has retired from hosting the viewing party atop the hill) but we just aren’t quite there yet. Think we could, but getting down there and discovering we can’t would be a pain.
I’m trying turmeric as a remedy for all-over pain, and it shows promise. But it also interferes with a long list of medications, and despite its use as a regular spice in amounts equivalent to a medical dose, it merits caution about going whole hog with it. Jane may not be able to use it. But we’ll see. We’ve resolved on a push to lose the weight. Once again!
Anyway, hope you all and yours in the US enjoy the day, have many hotdogs and that all the fireworks go off well! Wish we’d laid in a supply of sparklers, which we could get away with here in the heart of the city, but hey, we’ll hear the pops and booms of all the ninja fireworks all over town.
I’m doing the copyedits of Emergence today. Hope to do it all in one day. It may be a holiday, but the writing goes on.
Happy Independence Day to all our US salads, and may the coming year be better!
Indeed! Happy 4th to everyone here and abroad! Best wishes for the weight loss and increased mobility; we know here from experience that it’s a struggle just to find a program that works without feeling deprived or unmotivated.
Tomorrow the tankless water heater goes in. I will not be available to supervise, but have attempted to lay out everything our plumber and electrician might need, and will be on tap for phone consultation. When I went out tonight to attach the hose for tank draining tomorrow a.m., I discovered a largish puddle under the tank, and the water was barely lukewarm. Obviously it is on the verge of significant failure, so timing is good.
The neighbors, although not rising to the excesses traditional for New Year’s, are still filling the air with pops, booms, and smog. Both cats are ignoring the noise, and all the windows are shut against the smoke. Baked sourdough bread this afternoon before the war started.
Happy fireworks day! Here’s hoping you get a handle on all your projects, get the house sorted, the yard sorted and can settle down to some serious chillaxing.
Wishing all salads independence from what vexes, thwarts and oppresses them.
Happy Independence Day for all those who celebrate, and a generally happy day for all those who don’t, as well.
I’m very happy to notice, after only two weeks of using the night cast, that the sharp pain under my heel at every step from the bone spur is much less. It’s a very light cast of my lower leg and foot (up to the toes), that keeps my ankle at a right angle while I sleep. It’s removable, not meant to be walked on during the day; and it’s a miracle after four and a half years of pain at every step to be able to take short walks again without that pain!
I hope your treatments work as well.
Your body heals itself while you sleep. Apparently, when your foot is relaxed during sleep, the tendon plate underneath the foot that was damaged (at the bone spur on the heel bone where it attaches) shortens a bit. So it heals in the night to that shorter length. Then you get up and start walking on it, and the tendons underneath the foot are stretched again to the usual ninety-degree ankle angle, and that tears open the just-healed spot again.
I’ve been trying everything for four years, and just keeping the tendon under tension while I sleep so it gets a chance to heal to the correct length gives such relief after only two weeks!
The orthopedic surgeon wanted a follow-up visit in three months, so it might not be as fast for everyone.
Anyway, I can really recommend talking to a doctor about this removable night cast option, if you’ve been bothered by pain from bonespurs for a while.
Of course, after >4 years of walking the minimal number of steps possible (the medical and physiotherapy advice said to rest the heel as much as possible to give it a chance to recover), I’ve lost a lot of condition and gained some weight. Now the dominant pain is almost gone I’m starting to feel the smaller aches and discomforts related to that.
So now I have to start working on those two things too.
You might try exercises that can be done from a seated or lying down position. You can use canned goods or books as dumbbells. Low weights with many repetitions, and towels for stretches, etc. There’s an exercise show on our public broadcasting stations here in the US called “Sit and Be Fit” which are exercises done while seated in a chair (with your foot resting on the floor in a 90-degree position). Swimming might not be a good exercise because the foot is extended while kicking, but exercising while standing up to your neck in the pool would work.
I’m a fine one to talk, being an inveterate sofa spud myself. My activities have become more and more sedentary as my knee worsened before the surgery. Reading, knitting and sitting at the computer, my main activities, are all so strenuous and physically demanding. . . . One of the things I am looking forward to is being able to go to a nearby park, which is quite large, and walk about.
Remember isometric exercises?
Our 4th would have been near perfect until the fireworks spooked our dog and he bit my wife’s arm! A hospital trip and lots of medical glue later, she’s sleeping with the good painkillers. Not a great ending.
Good Lord! So sorry!
She’s still in pain, though doing better. She had to take the more expensive antibiotics as she’s allergic to amoxicillin!
I have (so far) avoided any of the knee, hip, ankle problems my mom had and late in lie, my grandmother had, but I will be aware of them as I get older. It seems to be a thing, at least for the women in my maternal line, so I know it’s not nice when you have to deal with it regularly.
Happy 5th, everyone! My 4th was busy and fun and mostly relaxing, though a few bouts of fireworks around here were at inopportune times and rather more, ah, loud and prankish and potentially worrisome than the kids doing so (and their families and certainly this neighbor) might have preferred. As far as I know, everyone and everything are OK. (Two bouts were excessive.) But hey, I hope folks had fun with that anyway.
I did web page CSS stuff for fun, along with font work, yesterday, and so I didn’t end up watching Stranger Things 3, which is happening today. — I’ve discovered some of my older web pages with CSS fonts are no longer “happy” with those fonts, and will be tracking down why, so I can stay on top of features and skills, and be satisfied that what I’d done stlll looks right. Geeky skills, but handy. (The browser has gotten pickier about font-faces being there, plus a few other quirks I’m trying to track down.) I also want to check what’s new since I last looked at CSS3, and I am going to try a graphics program to see if it works. (Inkscape now wants the user to build their own, still without a native Mac interface, running under Xquartz. Meh.) So I’ looking at alternatives, plus a new publishing program that might work well. I miss being able to do some things I used to do regularly.
I’m close to getting two more font-face drafts done for their first stage, still with the larger Pro character sets and kerning to go, and other faces in those families still to develop. But it’s (slow) progress toward what I want, and has been going very well for those. so yay!
Today and tonight and probably tomorrow, I’ll be watching chapters (episodes) of Stranger Things 3, plus attempting more (slow) laundry. I am likely to call and ask again about maintenance, as none appeared this week. (I didn’t really expect it to with the holiday, but still, it needs doing.)
I had a small amount of barbecue and cole slaw and will again today. Also a bologna sandwich (it fits with Stranger Things 2). But I forgot to order potato salad and don’t have potatoes on hand, darn it. Still happy about food selection.
Hmm, I have not gained weight, I don’t think, but I have discovered I no longer fit in a “slim fit” shirt in my size. I don’t think it’s significant shrinkage in the washer and dryer. So I willl be trying to lose a little weight or redistribute it through exercise. I/ll also give away those slim shirts. Darn it.
A stray or neighbor cat was meowing around my door yesterday, but I didn’t see him/her when I looked and called and waited. The cats around here are probably extra skittish of anyone they don’t know, due to people being people and cats being cats. Fireworks yesterday probably put the stray cats into hiding for a while.
Today’s hot and sunny and there were scattered showers yesterday. Typical hot summer outside. My apt. A/C has two modes: wait too long to come on, so you get too hot, but not as hot as if you had no A/C, which would be awful; and when it comes on, it freezes you out, so that you wonder if you have it set too cold. (No, it’s set to 75 or 76 for A/C, around 72 when the heater’s on.) The apt. is oriented such that you get constant sun all day, east/west windows. But hey, this is way better than not having A/C.
No word toward rent house or renovations. I am glad I renewed my apt. lease.
So, all in all, things are going pretty well. My finances are too iffy and my social life is non-existent, but I am working on fixing the one, which might help with the other. I am telling myself so, anyway.
Well, I’m due for some time to relax and binge-watch. Then back to font work and unboxing / reboxing toward future hoped-for plans.
Goober is convinced he can con me into extra feedings of moist, soft food, and has refused some flavors, which I’ll still sneak in to use them up. Funny how a cat who would let the other cat steal his food has become more demanding now that he gets to eat without competition and what he wants. — I am still realizing how off-balance the relationship was with Smokey, but I still very much regret not keeping him, and yet I don’t see any alternative having worked out. But I miss the little so-and-so, the good parts. If I had it to do over, I hope I would’ve not done that and found some way to live with it or ensure I knew he’d been placed with a good home, rather than wondering about it and missing him. My own danged fault that I did not handle it better. But I’m the sort who’d still want it better and demands more of myself than what I did. So I still hope he’s happy and loved somewhere, in some better situation. I still find myself reminded at least once a day or so. Living with it is not easy, and again, I made the choice, in frustration and anger, to give him away. But I feel I was wrong and let down both him and myself, on one of my most cherished principles. So, yeah.
But — The day is good, I’m making a little progress, and I’ve done enough to feel justified in taking a break and watching a show to relax. So, what have they been up to in Hawkins and in the Upside-Down? Popcorn is in order….
At last! — A workman arrived and did one repair and put in the work order on the dryer, I think, and is supposed to have replaced the parking lot porch light bulb, whatever type of bulb it uses. So if the dryer does indeed get repaired next week, oh, I will be exceedingly happy. There are other minor items if/when they get that fixed. So, hurray, success. I want that dryer vent (or whatever the real problem is) resolved. But there is actual forward motion detected from the previously immovable object! Yay!
And — Gasp! at what happens in (Ep.) Chapter 3.2. Oh, that’s, oh my, that’s…. (No spoilers, but oh, that was an unexpected twist from the Big Bad.)
OT and odd:
Does anyone else jump from body to body in dreams? or occupy more than one body and personality at a time?
I’m afraid to ask this kind of question in most companies, but I truly do not think that any here have an interest in having me put on a mental health hold.
Not generally. Rarely I may have a different point of view, as if I were watching TV, rather than being a participant in everything. But remember, my brain is wired differently.
A lot of my dreams are like watching video, and probably for the same reason you cite, because, yeah, me, too.
Tommy, I don’t remember many of my dreams, but of the few remarkable ones I remember something like that happened only once.
I dreamt I was biking home from school (as myself) and stopped off to swim at the open-air swimming pool on the way, but somehow the pool was continuing into the storage vaults under the old city center (along the canal docks in Utrecht, which in reality now contain a nice pancake restaurant we’d once visited). There was a dinosaur/dragon coming after the swimmers to eat them, and as soon as it got me I flipped to being an angel on a cloud looking down at the sleeping dragon lying curled up down below, without dreaming of being eaten in between. I didn’t consider it odd to change viewpoints (without waiting to dream of dying/being eaten), I figured I’d scared myself and boxed myself in too far, so I just had to get out of that dream experience.
I’ve never been in multiple viewpoints at once, that I remember; but I’ve been in really strange viewpoint characters, like a 4 inch tall pale blue luminescent matchstick figure (like a hatifnatter from the Moomin books by Tove Jansson) living in a rabbit burrow and an upturned kettle with hundreds of other similar figures, and being chased through my old school by a herd of pink and yellow giraffe stuffed toys; or a tall green luminescent pumpkin-headed ghost detective doing some noir murder-investigating (and I never read or watch noir stuff!) – I used to wonder about how the rest of that investigation would have gone, but by now I’ve forgotten the rest and only remember investigating some dark attic staircase by the dim green light of my own glowing.
Strange enough?
What annoys me more than dreams being strange is when dreams are so like reality that a memory from the dream gets confused with reality. As a teenager I asked my mum if she’d sown a button on my shirt yet, like I asked her a few days ago, and it turned out I’d only dreamt of asking her that, just before waking, and then never did so for real because I was convinced I’d already done so.
Nowadays that only happens when I’m still very tired when the alarm goes off, so I’ll turn off the alarm in my sleep and dream that I’m getting up etcetera to take away the urgency – that one is obvious as soon as I wake up for real, too late and in a panic when I realise the time. Still, it’s annoying that my sleeping mind considers taking away the sense of urgency and getting more sleep more important than dealing with the cause of the urgency, namely getting to work on time.
I do it for a living. 😉
Try two.
Only fair that I should share, no matter what these dreams say about my life at the time.
One: I am walking down a city street of red brick buildings and I look down a dead ended alley to see a man beating a woman and child of four with an automobile antenna. My self disappears and I am all three. The man is grimly doing what he must, because it is his duty and for the good of them all. The woman is moving as subtly as she can to protect her son from the worst of the pain and damage. The child does not understand why Daddy and Mommy are doing this, but knows that he must not move or whimper.
Two: I am a man in my early twenties with wavy, light brown hair walking along a wide walkway of large slabs of dark gray stone. There is a river/ canal flowing towards me at my right hand. It is studded with weeping willows and the occasional moored boat.
Suddenly there is a man walking at my left hand. He is a couple of years older than I am, and has shoulder length, blunt cut blond hair. He is wearing wide pants bloused at the ankle. Over this is belted a long shirt with long sleeves. All of his clothes are of rather darkish blues, the shirt darker than the trousers. He looks rather like what a cartoon of the boy with a finger in the dike would look like in real life.
He wants me to see something on his boat, so I let him precede me and we get on what looks like a large rowboat. There is a tall table in the middle of the boat with a machine on it. He seizes my right hand and thrusts it into the machine and starts turning the crank with his left. It is a meat grinder. The pain is incapacitating. I jump in to his body just before it reaches my shoulder.
In my new body, I look down at the corpse and the mess and just walk away.
BTW, when I was quite young, I used to be able to choose between four or five dreams as I fell asleep. I called it ‘changing the channel’.
Tommie, that’s two or three dreams of bodily pain within however long a time, fairly recent? Maybe a checkup for whatever might be going on, a doctor visit? I don’t know, but that seems worth a shot.
(And otherwise, I don’t have any notion of how to interpret those or why you’d dream those.)
The one with the canal sounds not quite like Venice, and yet the clothing and styles sound somewhat like that from a few centuries ago.
My mom once admitted she’d once had a very realistic, odd dream in which I think she was a male warrior, tribal era, maybe African, maybe European, I didn’t get a clear idea of that.
I don’t understand why we dream what we do, and how much of it is real or imagined, memories or working out problems, or just the body, mind, and spirit doing housekeeping. But we all have dream lives, and every culture has various ideas, some in common, about the dream world / dream-time and the nature of consciousness and the supernatural, including thing like foresight. I don’t know why, or how it works, or how much is real about it, and yet, we do.
The dream (from WOL? It’s been a few days. I’ll have to reread) about someone passing away, when she couldn’t have had any way of knowing or communicating in the hear-and-now real world, so an unexplained thing? — Yes, my experience about that friend was like that too, and I have no rational, logical way to explain that, and yet it was so. — And I wish he were still around today.
“There are more things in heaven and in earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, oh Horatio.” — Yes, in some way none of us understand, and yet it apparently exists on some level.
It’s a really clear set of dreams for having happened over forty years ago, isn’t it? I take them now to mean that I am the author of much of my own pain, and that it is high time I got a different life. I could never have seen that in my late teens and early twenties.
Most of the time, my dreams are pretty surreal and “dream logic” and jumbled, but now and again, I’ve had dreams that were like watching a tv program or movie with a real plot that made sense (and would make a good story, film or TV program) that my brain just invented totally without me being aware of it. It was like, here’s your dreams for tonight; oh, by the way, here’s a story we worked out for you completely out of the blue, fait accompli, there you go.
And then, there’s that thing where you invent a character and they take on a life of their own and you try to get them to do something or say something in a story and they’re not having any of it because it’s not something they would do or say.
When I was a child, I used to dream in stories, a chapter a night. One day I told an adult that I could hardly wait for bedtime because I wanted to find out what happened next. I discovered that this wasn’t the case for everyone, with adult shock and dismay as a response to my remarks, and I never dreamed consecutively again.
(Side Topic, then back to the dreaming topic: Since sometime early Saturday, the hot water has been going in and out and hasn’t stabilized. It is not uncommon for it to go off for a few hours or most of a day, here, but that stopped being common a while back. Now this. I really hope it’ll be fixed during the week. I really want/need more than a sponge bath, and I’ve only twice had hot water to wash dishes, over the weekend. Darn it.)
Dreams — I can’t remember ever having multiple viewpoints simultaneously in a dream. That would be quite something. I haven’t generally had the very unusual character viewpoints Hanneke has had. (Those sound kind of neat, actually.) (I’d read a story about some sort of noir detective dragon, or whatever he or she was. Sounds like a good story!)
But I had recurring dreams as a kid and teen, and around college age, I had lucid or directed dreams, where I was aware during the dream, or parts of it, and could go with the dream, which felt like it was helping me work through things, or was at least an adventurous way to dream. I had one experience where I was in between the dream-stay and the waking-state. I couldn’t move, and dream-imagery and reality were superimposed, with a lingering dream image of me trying to reach my younger self for some reason.
I had one instance in dreams where I have no logical, rational explanation for why I could sense that. But months later, I found out bad news from a friend about a friend I hadn’t seen in years. The shock for me was, when I’d had the dream was right around when that happened. We hadn’t talked or seen each other in a few years by then, and there was no way I could have known what happened. So…I don’t know. I have heard of things like that before, and I know it shook me up badly when I dreamed that, and woke up sweating, shocked, I’d never dreamed anything like that before, so realistic and intense and not what I would have wanted, awake or dreaming. — I never did understand the connection we had or if it was at all strong or meaningful for him. And I still don’t see how to explain that dream. But somehow, I relived that scenario in my dream, his and my viewpoint together, so I was him in the dream or he was me. I don’t know why I would be able to sense that. We were friends, I thought there was a connection, but I didn’t think he felt anything other than friendship or acquaintance there. So I don’t know why, if there was some sort of message, it would have been me sensing it instead of someone more close to him, both relationship-wise and geographic distance.
When I was grieving after my mom died, I had a very macabre dream-image, completely unreal and very unwanted. It shook me up so much it woke me, and I prayed not to have something like that again. — Ever since then, I have only rarely remembered my dreams. — Until the last few months, when this seems to have eased up some, so that now I will sometimes remember partially from my dreams, but not always all o the dream or for very long after waking up. — I’d like to remember again and I’d like to have that lucid / directed dreaming again.
I don’t really know what our connection is between the dream-world and the waking-world. Another state of consciousness? Another dimension or state of being? I don’t know how much is reality, how much is imagination, how much is our brains and bodies and spirits doing housekeeping, cleanup. How much is problem-solving? How much is playing? I don’t know. Do we have any psychic powers? I have no real idea. But things like that occur anecdotally from people who are otherwise sensible, not prone to superstition. So — Well, I do maintain that “there are more things in heaven and in earth than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy.” Meaning, just because our current science doesn’t understand everything, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist somehow. There’s so much we don’t know, even about the things we think we do know. Heh.
I have also had my share of sheer fantasy dreams and nightmares, and some off that can be very fun and some of it is probably very telling. Or some is problem-solving.
I am therefore not one to criticize people’s dreaming skills. We all seem to be geared to dream for varying reasons. It can be fun or useful, and it’s certainly different.
I know I’ve switched scenes in dreams, and sometimes switched viewpoint characters. I can’t recall being multiple views simultaneously. The one instance where it was blended, I think I was “along for the ride” to see from his viewpoint as if I were him, with my own awareness there too, but it seemed to be more from his viewpoint than mine.
Of Note: If you are ever chased by “giant chickens / ostriches” who are clearly out to eat you, beware of mazes, wet concrete, and large public bathrooms with big jars of ants, which turn over and open. Heh, this was a recurring dream sequence a few times as a young teen, likely influenced by one of the Ray Harryhausen movies of one of Jules Verne’s books, the Mysterious Island, which featured those giant, menacing birds. Hah, I don’t know why it got to me as a kid or why it recurred in dreams.
Things go well over here, if a little bumpy. The tankless water heater has been installed, and appears so far to be operating at nominal levels. Since we went to the effort of rewiring that entire circuit to accommodate this one piece of equipment, I’m tempted to buy a backup tankless heater, same make and model, in case this one breaks in a few years. It won’t precisely be plug and play, but we will be able to get it replaced within 24 hours, or as soon as we line up the electrician and plumber. It’s the size and shape of a city-sized Yellow Pages phone book, so storage will not be troublesome. The last water heater lasted 15 years; I hope this one does likewise.
I am in the throes of interviewing for a new janitor for the library. We have been muddling along with a temp for the past 3 months, because that’s how long it takes the state to get its act together. Now it’s run-run-run, ding-ding-ding because we have to process the applicants by the end of the month. Anyone who deals with a monumental bureaucracy knows that if you need something done, you will be waiting on the higher-ups pleasure, but if administration needs you to do something, by all the be-feathered gods you will do it yesterday! We were already short staffed; one of our people left for another job, and this week my other librarian is going on a month long charity expedition to Africa, so we are scuttling about like Dinner in the vents.
Tell me about bureaucracies! Trying to get anything done with the VA is like pushing a rope!
Off-Topic: Math Help Needed, Please, Because My Brain Is Mush.
I’ve been sitting here doing font stuff for I don’t know how many hours, and my brain right now is not remembering some basic trig I haven’t used in a while, but need at the moment. The general principle is one I need to write down and re-memorize.
I need to find the angles from the x-axis and the y-axis for the slope between two known points. In this case, I need to remove the skew from an italic sans-serif (It has no upright / Roman).
P[1] : ( 93, 0 );
P[2] : ( 223, 667 );
So the distance is given by:
P[3] : ( 130, 667 );
I know I should be able to determine both angles by applying a trig function to x/y or y/x, and my memory says fuzzily that maybe any of the inverse sin(), cos(), tan() should work, the arc- or superscript (-1) trig functions.
I do still recall that once I have either the horizontal or vertical angle, then the other one is 90 – theta or phi, that angle.
What I need is the horizontal angle, which is the horizontal skew from the vertical axis, y-axis. That is, call K the delta-x distance between the y-axis and the actual point’s x-coordinate. K = 130 in this case.
My angle should be determined by applying a trig function to ( 130 / 667 ) or to ( 667 / 130 ), and I am highly irritated that I can’t recall which function, or if I’m confusing something here. I am surprised I don’t recall this, as finding an angle or using an angle to find where a point should go, really should be things I should still have memorized for use in graphic arts and font design.
I am going to write a couple of index cards to keep at my desk for a while, and then file them.
I intend to look back at the wiki article on the trig functions and identities later, but I’d appreciate the help now. — Meanwhile, I’m going to take a break, get some lunch, and get back to a different font task after that. — I’ll check back tonight and likely will look at wiki then, after an evening nap.
(I’ve been trying out things on copies of old fonts, to see what does and does not work well in applying transformations to fonts, for effects or useful / needed changes. — So that’s why I’m trying to un-skew a sans-serif italic that has no Roman version. I’ve also determined a little better when or how much it’s possible to nudge font weights just by expanding the stroke. (It’s only somewhat useful for sans-serifs with low contrast and in small increments. Past that, and you lose the contrast, so a typical serif font with that applied too much ends up looking like it’s all the same thickness, more like a slab-serif. That can be fine if that’s what you’re going for, but usually, for serif fonts, you don’t want to do that. This is why software bolds of fonts look either oddball or too bloated and all blobbed together. If you use the effect to change the weight, you can, if you use it wisely and for certain purposes.)
Note: By guess-and-check, I know that -15deg is too much, and the angle must be somewhere between -9 and -13 degrees. Two typical italic angles are -15deg and -12deg to -12.5deg. — One 70’s font, Eras, is famous for having a very slight angle around 5 to 7.5 degrees.
If no repairman shows today for the dryer vent line, I am going to call the mgmt. ofc. and remind them again. Grrr.
Okay, going back to my notes from mumble years ago:
the distance between the points is R: sqrt(a^2 + b^2) – here b is 130 and a is 667. So R is 679.55
the sine of the angle between A and the x-axis is a/R, and the cosine is b/R. So the angle with the y-axis will be 90 – that.
sin A = 0.982; cos A = 0.191. A=78.97
so the angle with the y-axis is 11.03
Happy High Summer, and Fireworks season to all. We got a bit of camping in, a couple of quick grandson visits, and then a very quiet 4th of July resting at home, except for those same neighbors with big boomers that everyone else seems to have LOL. Planning a little visit to California end of July; bought my tickets the day before the last big earthquake; hoping that’s all settled down by the time we get there.
Once we were rested up, we joined our daughter, grandson and his NYC friend, visiting for a week. Met them at a very small, but really nice little science museum in Lancaster, PA. University based, filled with lots of children activities, some live reptiles for research and education, tons of fascinating minerals, aswesome small fossils (the fossil birds nest complete with broken, hatched eggshells and nesting material was incredible), a small planetarium … so nice; no big crowds to fend off. Turned out the grandson had been there for school, so after being pretty reasonable about the whole thing, was found outside, sitting high on a fence railing, deeply engrossed in … a BOOK 🙂 He’s read it at least 6 times; doesn’t matter. Bonus Thank You for you all: It was a recommended here book; later in the day over dinner, he and the NYC friend had a brotherly tussle over who got to read it on the way home. Double Bonus: Grandson told me his other best friend has borrowed a number of the books to read at home. Hope for the future, peeps … hope 🙂 For an only child, this remarkable boy has a lot of brothers.
Hanneke, I’ve taken close notes on your heel spur issue. The boys talked me into taking the steps at the museum … up and down, up and down, rinse and repeat till you wake up the heel spurs LOL … even the special insoles weren’t up to that challenge, and my cane has come out of retirement. It’s been hot and humid here in PA; good weather to curl up, rest the heel and read.
Dreamed a big, important dream the other night. The only part I remember is there was a BIG RED helicopter right over my head … the rest will forever remain a mystery! I did, a few years ago, dream a vision of my beloved aunt, woke up very upset, and promptly forgot the entire dream. Until 3 days later when family managed to track me down at a campground with no cell phone reception to tell me she’d passed away … estimated about the time she came to me … to say goodbye? She was very happy in the dream.
CJ, the yard and fish sound like so much work, but so very lovely; you create beauty wherever you go 🙂
Cathy, it’s so great he and his friends are reading books and loving it. Enjoying a trip to a science museum enough to go back and spend a long time, also a very good sign. Glad that people here could give you such good recommendations for him.
Man, it’s been too long since I last visited the planetarium and the natural science museum, the art museum, or the zoo here. Years and years. — That ankylosaurus model is still probably where it’s always been. That thing’s heavy and probably solid metal and concrete, or some such.
(I spent parts of yesterday and today looking online at early typography examples, from Nicolas Jenson in the 15th century. We still use fonts strongly related to those today. But also a lot of work by people like Morris Fuller Benton, Fred Goudy, Oz Cooper, Hermann Zapf, Adrian Frutiger, Paul Renner, and a few others, from the 20th century, along with people fro the 18th and 19th centuries who made important typefaces.)
(And that wiki article uses a very computer-sciencey offshoot of the Century types, in showing the mathematical equations.)
What book was he/they reading, Cathy? Sounds like a real good one that I (and others) might want to read if I/they haven’t.
Raesean, I THINK it was one of the Brotherband Chronicles books by John Flanagan. Rangers Apprentice series was recommended here and it was out of stock so we went to these. The boys were also passing around Eragon (Christopher Paolini), also recommended here. Those I got for Kindle, in Spanish, though he has Eragon in both languages, in hardback and ebook. He’s been slowly adding all the Harry Potter books in Spanish too … AND reading them. What made me happiest was to see all 3 boys “brother-fighting” over who could read which first, and sharing them. Probably didn’t hurt that my wise daughter ran them ragged through water parks, pools, amusement parks, 4H Dog Obedience lessons etc. for 5 straight days … by the time we left the science museum the boys were crying, begging for a day OFF, to do nothing except read books … and eat LOL. My daughter is a VERY wise lady 😉
Following the fonts and math discussion in amazement and admiration. I am of the “could NEVER memorize those rote tables” persuasion of math development. When I run out of fingers, I see patterns of dots in my head even if I don’t want them. My beloved math teacher senior year “Damn. You missed half the year due to illness. Now you hand me a Calculus test with one equation on, and it’s so well done. Remember when I made you cry at the blackboard in 5th grade because you couldn’t snap back those memorization answers? I was WRONG. You ARE good at math; we were wrong. Now if only you got the right answer on the test, I coud give you an A+ … but all the work is right; would an A- do?” LOL, oh yes. I could do the calc, see the patterns … 7 x 9 … oh, no, never the arithmetic. Wouldn’t want to try it now anymore, sigh … Comment
7×9=(7×3)x3=21×3=63
7×9=(6×9)+(1X9)=54+9
=(5×9)+(2×9)=45+18
Multiplication is really just addition. There are often ways you can decompose something one can’t do in one’s head into something one can. It’s not so hard to square numbers in the teens or 20’s by remembering the Binomial Theorem.
Paul, YES! These kinds of sub-routines fill my “math” brain … dot patterns on invisible dominos in my brain, in patterns of 2’s or 3’s or … broken down equations as you describe and more. One would THINK just memorizing the darn tables would be easier but it’s just not the way my brain is wired LOL. I’m fine on paper, with a sharp pencil or pen though … more patterns! Comment
PJ, thank you! — I got there, but only after a lunch break and other work, then coming back to it and way too long crawling through my memories to nudge the pieces together. That, plus a calculator, plus skimming through the wiki article on trig functions.
The solution I arrived at was to plug 130 / 667 into the calculator and try inverse / arc trig functions, and then guess which one it was: arctan(x/y) aka tan^(-1) (x/y) gave me the right answer.
Here’s what I came up with:
arctan(x/y) = arctan(130.0/667.0) = 11.02883;
{
x = r * cos( theta );
y = r * sin( theta );
}
sin( theta ) = opposite / hypotenuse;
cos( theta ) = adjacent / hypotenuse;
tan( theta ) = opposite / adjacent;
(*) I have written down your answer, so I have two ways to get to it in future.
My trig and calculus classes were something like 35 years ago, so your mumble-flex years ago, yeah, I can sure identify with that. Back when I was in college the first time, and for several years after, I could rattle off the raft of identities and values, and kept a cheat sheet (several index cards) in my old trig book for reference. Whether that old trig book has survived moves and storage spaces, I’m no loner sure. (Dang it.)
But years of not regularly using calculus and trig have meant, yup, it is somewhere deep in old memory, so it was only sheer luck and old rote memories eventually, slowly getting jogged that (almost) did it. I still had to check wiki to be sure what was what, and why. (I would need to read the article and look at my old notes to really have it back.)
So thank you, and I’m saving this for reference. I ought to have it memorized still, since angles and (x, y) and radius distances still matter when I’m doing some kinds of drawings and font work.
I am still having trouble with this over-50, nearly / already at middle age thing. I’m here, and some days it feels like I’m still a teenager and some days it feels like I’ve gotten old somehow, but either way, I am not really ready to call myself middle-aged, even though I am. I am also not ready for it to take so long to dig through my memory to find something I used to know by heart and endless practice, and then still have to look it up to make sure not only if I’m right, but why, because not everything was coming back clearly. (And I used to have my old trig book and calculus textbook right with my other reference books, right above my desk. Moving has still thrown that all into a cocked hat, and will again when and if I get to move into a house again. But that’s dependent on having an income to support myself doing so. — Which is why I keep doing the slow font work.)
Man…all that water under the bridge, and all those interrelated equations!
(The outcome of un-skewing that font? Hmm, even so, there were slight variances, so the glyphs are just slightly askew one way or the other, instead of being uniform. And that’s from a professionally designed and produced font from a big foundry, from people wh are supposed to be better at it than I am by far. Oh well, I wanted to see if I could do it and have a personal, not-for-profit, not-for-commercial use (because it’s owned by that company and those designers) version of the font, to learn how and to use it.
No wonder Goober thinks I’m no fun — I’m stuck at this computer for hours, doing geeky work. (Not like I didn’t expect this, it’s what I do. But still, haha.)
Drat, that was supposed to be indented under PJ’s comment.
I’m on about the third or fourth iteration of math notes – the first few were on spiral-bound index cards, and the current one is ring-bound two-hole-punched index cards – 4×6, I think.
Starts with the basic numbers, goes through trig and geometry, gets into the calculus, and has a section for formal logic. (Also has the Greek alphabet, because sometimes I forget which one is which.) Done in India ink and Pigma pens (colored): they’re holding up really well. I think the first couple included the cards for exams: we were allowed one 3×5 card for a midterm and 2 for a final.
Here you lot are doing calculus and I could never memorize the multiplication tables or add or subtract without using fingers!!! I used to chant the times tables walking home from school trying to memorize them. No soap.
As far as I’m concerned, if God had wanted me to do math in my head, She wouldn’t have given us calculators.
The only tangents I know about are OS* tangents.
*Oooooh! Shiny!
WOL, I recognise that! I’m the same, some multiplications I can still make mistakes with unless I really stop to repeat half the table to myself.
As for the algebra formulas, all the (a+b)²=c², I never could remember which formula I was supposed to use for what – all my a’s and b’s were always allowed to react any which way they liked, just like all my + and – signs in chemistry…
I liked chemistry and physics for their explanations of how the world worked, but had to drop them as soon as I could because I’d never get a passing grade, because of failing all the math needed for them.
When I needed to turn a compass rose circle into an oval for my patchwork, I had to ask a civil engineering colleague at work (where I was a librarian) for help. She knew the math/algebra, but much easier: had a CAD-program on which she quickly drew a quarter oval compass rose and printed it for me without the necessity of figuring all the math out herself.
Trigonometry, maybe, but not calculus. (Though the simplest ways to get the area under a curve start with geometry: they’re the ones that were used in ancient times.)
@CJ et al. — A question on Latin scribal and printing abbreviations and symbols:
Yesterday, I was looking at the Wiki article on Nicolas Jenson, or the examples of his early typefaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Jenson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jenson.png
In the exemplar page below his colophon in the article, I came across two abbreviation signs I wasn’t familiar with, and two others I could guess at.
The one I really cannot guess is at the end of the fourth line after the section / paragraph break, at the end of the word, « utebat’: ». There is what looks like the hook of a question mark without the dot, turned on its side. I want to guess this might stand for a word ending with an R in it, like -orum, -arum, -erum, but I don’t know enough. It’s following « nullã », with the tilde marking an abbreviation for nullam. My guess is, utebat’ is probably a verb form there, but it might be a noun form. (I’m guessing siris, wit the long s at the start, is the main verb.)
There is a q3 in which the shape like a 3 at the x-height and just below the baseline, appears to be an abbreviation for endings like -que, -quem, -quam, something like that, as though it’s a scribal abbreviation with the -e and -m trailing off and turned on their sides. — Or do I have that wrong?
Also appearing are two forms, _p and p_ , in which the first has a top-left corner hook joined to the middle of the descender, and the other form has a line crossing through the descender. Given that one is p_sona, I am guessing the line or hook stands for -er- or occasionally for -re-, which would make that « persona ». (Again with the long s.) That might fit for the other word, but I couldn’t guess it.
I picked up easily that the tildes over the vowels stand for a following -m or -n, to save space. After all, that’s what they do today, including with the Spanish ñ. I was surprised I could get all five vowels with the tilde, which not all fonts have. I don’t know if a y-tilde was ever attested, or æ or œ with a tilde.
The example images only show a lowercase v in one instance with a Roman numeral, and otherwise use lowercase u, since u/v and i/j hadn’t split yet. — I wonder if there was ever a UE and ue ligature, since I don’t recall ever seeing one, and I don’t think one is included in Unicode. (This seems odd to me, given the æ and œ ligatures are standard, even though I know they used Greek Y in Latin instead. They had both UE (vowel) and VE (V/W consonant) forms in Latin, so it seems odd there isn’t a common ligature.
I did not find lowercase k, or a j variant, or a w (which would have been an unlikely ligature for Latin, Italian, and French). The example pages are lacking most of the capitals.
I’m still looking at a large, beautiful scan of a page of “De Ætna,” which may be in a different type font but also from Jenson. It may give examples of the missing letters.
I had to hunt for the long-s letter in Unicode, ſ but I was surprised I could type a Śś, which was handy enough on the Mac. — Besides the ct ligature, I did not find the st ligature with final -s, our usual -s-. I found instead multiple examples of long s (initial and medial, short s being only final like in Greek at that time) and ligatures or very close pairs of long s, one with short s but not in the ß form, like fs instead; and double long s as a ligature, plus long s with t. — I am so, so glad the long s was dropped and we went back to the standard s. But surprisingly, even in the low-resolution scans, in Jenson’s type, the long s and the f are not too hard to ddistinguish.
I’m irritated: My paint/photo and vector drawing software packages do not have an auto-trace function or module that I can find. I am going to have to ind a alternative. — I have in mind to do an auto-trace and pull out examples of each letter / symbol, to create a rough font, and possibly a smooth font. I don’t find a libra / open source / free Jenson font-family. There is a fairly cheap, but too-thin Jenson from one vendor, and a pricey Jenson from Adobe, and a somewhat pricey (for fonts) version from Bitstream that is also too thin, Venetian 301 BT. — I’ve found Nick (?) Shinn of Shinn Type has a new font-family called Goodchild which is very nice, but also too pricey for me at present. So, for fun, I may try to trace a font from images. I know the old distressed / grungy / inkblot style is popular for special uses, and a clean version or alternate series would be useful too. — Both modern large x-height and old-fashioned but elegant small x-heights would be useful. But I don’t know if I want to put a lot of time into a side project, except that the idea is to grow my skills, so I can get good at that technique too.
Only the Adobe and Bitstream versions seem to have more than Roman, Italic, and Bold, no Bold Italic except in their two font-families and the Shinn Type version.
I’m liking the heavier and quaint, blobby feel from the scans, though two examples were done to high quality printing, particularly for back then (1472 to 1495). So these give some interesting design choices as possibilities. I am very sure that transforming a scan Into a digital vector font will be fraught with challenges and best-guesses and personal preferences for a design thesis. — So right now, I’m exploring and want to see if it’s workable doable, as a way to get my technique going, but it’is also secondary to others which have higher priority and are further along.
(Unrelated, I asked the designer of the public font, Fanwood, like Fairfield, via email if he would do further weights for it. I don’t know if that will happen or if he got the email I sent, but it is a very handsome type from the 20’s / 30’s, IIRC, done by Rudolf Ruzicka initially. It has very good support for foreign languages and has small-caps if your program can access that feature, rather than simulating it by scaled type.)
I did a fast search on “Pomponius siris” and came up with Internet Archive’s version, which has “utebatur” there. The one that looks like q3 is the abbreviation for “que”. P with the crossbar is “per”. My transcription:
quibus legibus exlex. Caecilius in Sarpasomene: Quid narras barbare cum indomitis moribus illiterate illex es. Sisenna li.iiii. Armis equis commeatibus nos magis iuverunt exleges et minus honore dignos putabitis. M.T. per Silventio: Non quo illi aut exlegem ullam: aut causam pecuniae publicae contemptam atque abjectam putarunt.
Lurchones diciti sunt a lurchando. Lurchare est cum aviditate cibum sumere. Luc. Saty. li.ii. Nam quid metino subjecto que huic opus signo vel lurcharet lardum & carnaria faretrum parum conficeret. Pomponius siris lapathium nullam utebatur: lardum lurchabat lubens. Plautus in Persa: Perennis herbae lurcho edax fugax. Luc. Sat. li.v. Vivite lurchones: come dones vivite ventres. Varro in Eumendibus: Contra cum psaltepisia et cum flora luchare astrepis.
Modern (well, 19th-century) text of this same passage:
quibus legibus exlex.
Caecilius Harpazomene:
Quid narras, barbare, cum indomitis [bis] moribus,
illiterate? Illex es.
Sisenna lib. III: “Armis, equis, commeatibus nos magis juverrunt exleges: et minus honore dignos putabitis?” M. Tullius pro Cluentio [c.34]: “Non quo illi aut exlegem Sullam, aut causam pecuniae publicae contemptam atque abjectam putarent.”
Lurcones dicti sunt a lurcando: lurcare: est cum aviditate cibum sumere. Lucilius Satyrarum lib. II:
Nam quid moetino subjectoque huic opu’ singo,
Ut lurcaretur lardum, et carnaria furtim
Conficeret?
Pomponius Syris:
Lapathium nullum utebatur; lardum lurcabat lubens.
Plautus Persa [III, 3, 16]:
Perenniserve, lurco, edax, furax, fugax.
Lucilius Satayrarum lib. V:
Vivite, lurcones, comedones; vivite, ventres.
Varro Eumenidibus: “Contra cum psalte Pisia et cum Flora lurcare act strepis.”
Awesome, PJ, thank you. So the hook is an “-ur,” so I was close, and “q3” is indeed “due,” so I guessed right on it (or close). And most of those tildes are -m rather than -n, but used for either.
That helps my transcription a lot, and lets me remember those as shorthand marks.
The conventions there point to some really neat possibilities, but were part of being fluent and literate back then.
I spent a little time looking at the De Ætna sample, and will have a couple of questions there once I finish writing it out. There are at least two other abbreviation marks for common endings, and there are a few typographic flourishes and alternates, plus early punctuation they were trying to settle on. (But most of our punctuation was starting to be used by 1472 to 1495 when those were printed.) The De tea page also has samples of early but inconsistent accent marks, such as (at least) é and è, though whether those meant stress or length / close vs. open, isn’t clear from the example. There’s close to a full alphabet there and the scan is pretty clear, which is great for what I’m looking for.
This made me wonder how many pages of a typical newspaper or magazine or paperback I might have to go through to find a full-enough character set, if I were going to do a revival or if I were doing a linguistic or archaeological research, as some future person looking at the puzzling Americans or USA’ans. 😉
(It’s amazing how well those books have held up for nearly 550 years, and how one that earliest printing was.)
One of the examples is in early Italian, still showing holdovers from Mediaeval Latin. And with my background, I can almost guess at some things, while others, it’s as though I’ve overheard a conversation in another room, but couldn’t quite get al of it, as if I should be able to understand it more fully, but haven’t concentrated enough. Plus there’s just enough difference in endings and vocabulary words and sound changes to make it not quite in reach without knowing Latin or earliest Italian. I want to look at it more and see just how much I can guess at or discover.
I still wonder how G morphed into g from the fall of the Roman Empire through the uncial and semi-uncial and Carolingian stages of writing, into that “g” that was already stable by Charlemagne’s time, and then completely standardized by the time Gutenberg and others began printing books. The “g” form seems even more unlikely than elongating the s into long s.
For the development of lower-case letters, I’d recommend that old standby “The 26 Letters”, which has very nice illustrations showing how it happened.
It’s possible to find books online covering medieval handwriting and abbreviations – check in places that get into medieval genealogy.
There’s some good information here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/soc.genealogy.medieval/medieval$20handwriting/soc.genealogy.medieval/IVqBCnBi7gY/XRta__xPeuoJ
I’m a bit late to this discussion, but coming back to dreams, here’s a good quote:
I checked, and yes, The 26 Letters (by Oscar Ogg) was one of the books that I borrowed several times from one of the two local library branches, lo, these many years ago. I’ve ordered a used copy, but didn’t see a page to report the condition. There was one and only one copy listed in paperback, cheap, unless I wanted to pay dearly for a hardbound copy. That book, and even more so, The Romance of Writing by Keith Gordon Irwin, were formative in my appreciation for the history of the alphabet and a love of type and calligraphy, languages and books.
Hmm, I looked back, and the Lærti(u)s sample and others are for earliest Jenson, while the De Etna samples were the earliest for the Bembo typeface, but also done by Jenson’s team, and there was some cross-fertilization of ideas and manpower / skills by others, all active during the same time, in Venice and Florence, at least: Arrighi, Griffo, Aldus Manutius (Aldo Manuzio), and others. I may have some of the timing muddled from reading and skimming several articles. (And I’ve already forgotten where Alcuin (Alcwin), an Englishman, fits in.) IIRC, Claude Garamond was a bit later, but also close in time. So, fueled by a growing literate class and wealthy patrons and church scholars, Gutenberg’s (possibly borrowed but also innovated) invention of the (European version) of the printing press took off with multiple skilled people with the insight to realize what a great idea this was, and who created, in the process, several of the typefaces we still use today, in their earliest forms, bought, copied, refined, again and again, with new typefaces created along the way, influenced by those first types, by calligraphy and monumental inscriptions, and by developments along the way in technology.
It’s really interesting that there is evidence they were experimenting with different forms and not quite satisfied, and striving for more perfect and beautiful type. It is also interesting that even at the beginnings, they had different tastes, even from individual designers, so that they already had several typeface styles being developed. (And by necessity, each set of punches / matrices was different, as each were physically unique objects) so this encouraged or caused unique and new looks. Italy, France, Germany, Holland, England, Spain and Portugal, apparently nearly every county in Europe at the time, were getting into printing and designing type.
No wonder I’m tired. I’ve been up since whatever woke me at 4:30am, plus I overheard a neighbor’s phone conversation outside my door, sometime between then and 6:00am.
It didn’t fully occur to me then, since I had been in bed and didn’t think I ought to go out and stick my foot in it, as not my business, but I hope the third party being discussed is not in danger of being kicked out. He’s apparently a relative or friend, and possibly around here, living here, and presumably, if I understand right about who’s who, likely a young adult or a teenager (minor). So I am hoping I wasn’t mistaken in not interceding with an (unwanted) opinion, and more hopeful than that, that the person being discussed is not in any danger of being kicked out or running away, or losing their place / home. — Sometimes, my conscience and empathy are way too overdeveloped for my own good, and I have trouble telling when I’m being sensible or when I’m not taking enough initiative. What I overheard was disapproving, and bits of it have been nagging at my brain all day, while trying to work and go through my daily routine. So I hope whoever it is is and will be all right. But it’s another reminder to me that being gay is still not accepted, or not fully so, by a lot of people, for various reasons, which do have to be considered, even if I personally disagree and have my own experience of those opinions.
I need to take a break, eat, feed the cat, and rest a while.
I hope the (young?) guy in question is all right. I also hope his family and friends will be ore positive and supportive than what I heard. Dang….
Goober’s hungry and I’m going to knock off working for a while, at least.
There is a big brushfire in the middle of Maui heading towards our town, and the north end of town is being evacuated. The smoke is creating IFR conditions, and we are all hoping the firefighters get it under control soon. Library staff may end up having a slumber party at my house because some of them can’t get home until the roads are reopened; we already have one refugee.