Casting About

Today is directionless. Yesterday was, as well. I have had fun setting up the Mailbox Locator but of late I can hardly stand to think about it. I recently posted about 750,000 payphone numbers to my old stand-by (the Payphone Project). I did this after a friend told me that a patient had gone missing from the mental hospital at which she worked. The patient called from a payphone, and no other resource except the Internet allowed them to match the location of the payphone to its phone number that showed up on the caller id. That, I think, is cool, and adds wings to my claim that the phone companies have no reason to keep this information confidential.

Maybe it is the beautiful weather that has me casting about like this. I could stand up and sit at that piano across the room to finish learning Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. The WTC is one of the great mountains of piano music, and one does not choose to approach it in its totality on a whim.

But playing other composers' music is a re-creative act. I am in a mode for creating, or for rummaging through that part of my mind. To say that one is creative is not a compliment. In most situations creativity is an annoyance. It bothers people, especially those who ask a lot of questions.

I could do something more substantive with my random words project, or with the dictionary server I finally got around to setting up. So many fabulous words have turned up in the randomness of things: Shockdog is today's crunchy sounding word. It makes me think of the sentence "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz," which is notable for the fact that it contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet. Jackdaws. Shockdogs. Maybe today's project should be the creation of a sentence that uses the word Shockdog and contains all the letters of our alphabet. That would be a noble achievement.

What is a Jackdaw, anyway? Ah, it's a bird. I think I knew that at some place in life.

I heard something interesting on Paul Harvey this morning. You know it will be of transcendental significance when Paul Harvey announces that you need to give him your "undivided attention" as he reads you this next news item.

The story is that the design of the neurons in our brains are amazingly similar to the design of the known universe. Here is what he is talking about.

I resist weepiness over the notion that the universe is in us, and we are in it, and our tangible connection to distant nebulae and galaxies is as direct as our connections to our parents. But I do find found it interesting how patterns repeat in nature. Patterns and principles repeat in life. I once read a description of how the Internet works, and I thought its design contained a good metaphor for human relationships. Minimizing points of failure is a baseline principle in network design, as are redundancy and backward compatibility. Substitute a few words and generalities and one could apply the same ideas to all manner of existences, hopefully without reducing it to a pithy maxim.

I have read that scientists, with all their knowledge and information, are more likely than others to believe in God. I wonder how true that is.