Kari's cottage

Located on Charleston Lake, we made our way out of the city during rush hour Friday.. it wasn't all that bad, and we were pretty much always moving, perhaps due to the return back to my place for meat I forgot...

Picked up Adam at his office at Queen's Park. Should have gone in and seen it.. didn't think.


Stopped in Whitby to eat and bring up some ribs and pulled pork.



Some of us were lucky enough not to be driving...



There...




Fire




When everyone else went to sleep I had the opportunity to take a few dozen night shots... which I won't show you cuz I respect your time.








Pretty self explanitory.




















Golf balls from the bottom of the lake... Apparently the hardest Jordan has worked to play a bit of golf. Final score: 13-2?






Adam learning to golf. As great as it sounds!


Massive bbq w massive amount of meat for 6 people. Claire mixed the burgers according to a family recipe... And I have to say, I think they were probably the best burgers I ever had. Yeah. That good.


Dinner, consisting of 2 racks of ribs, 18 burgers, salad, fried onions and mixed vegetables. Top 5 dinner. Everything was so good.


Later, at the fire, looking at the drinks and the sauna.


Coal Miner's Daughter; Hastings kept the fire burning large that night.


The array.


I'm unhappy to report there was some bicep kissing that night.


Not my feet...




Those golfing tips really show!




Washers.










Wrist deep in the stinker.














Out on the motorboat.




Outlook.

EA Sports NHL 10 - an early review

http://www.downgoesbrown.com/2009/09/nhl-2010-review.html

Pretty hilarious stuff... Here is a sample or two..

New Features:
Players can now snatch a puck out of the air with their glove hand (note: feature does not apply to Andrew Raycroft).

Bugs:
Simming ahead several years in franchise mode can lead to unrealistic results. For example, I simmed ahead to 2011, and the game listed one of the teams as playing in "Phoenix".

Song of the day: Hayden - Stride

Released twice on two separate albums with different lyrics (kinda*) and a totally different feel, Stride. Kinda*, in the way that verses are interchanged, which doesn't seem big I suppose, but with the music (mostly acoustic vs. mostly electric) has both songs feeling very different.

I've loved Hayden for a really long time, and well before meeting him at "The Trash" in Kingston before his show. Ryan and I snuck in (waltz in actually.. ) and hung out before the show that night around 4-5 pm. We had a drink and watched as Hayden ate an enormous plate of spaghetti... really great and such a lovely guy. He was still touring on his Everything I Long for LP (with a bunch of EPs involved>...) and he played "Skates" after an enourmous amount of crowd encouragement. Also, the Neil Young song. I've seen him subsequently, more mature, and never like that.

Anyway, here is Stride x2 for direct download and listen.

Moving Carefully (song 2)

The Closer I get (song 2)


The Moving Carefully version lyrics:
Feelin Right
Feelin ok to like
You inside
I think I've made the right decision here

You and I we take it all in stride
You and I rely on little things to get by

Feelin Good
Feelin like I should
Deep inside
I think I've made the right decision here

You and I we take it all in stride
You and I rely on little things to get by


The Closer I get version lyrics:
Feelin Good
Feelin like I should
Deep inside
I think I've made the right decision here

You and I we take it all in stride
You and I rely on little things to get by

Feelin right
Feelin ok to lie
You inside
I think I've made the right decision here

You and I we take it all in stride
You and I rely on little things to get by


I've heard you have to like Hayden to love Hayden... maybe that's true. But really, isn't that like anything else you hold dear?

Fermi would know that the average human hanging out is roughly a 100 Watt device...

The Fermi problem.

"Fermi estimate is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis, approximation, and the importance of clearly identifying one's assumptions. Named for 20th century physicist Enrico Fermi, such problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities that seem impossible to compute given limited available information."

This applies to everything. Social science, is there life beyond our solar system, how many jelly beans in a jar... A great one tried out, that has an answer I would guess because of my (underdeveloped, relatively uninterested in) biology background...

http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2009/09/answer-to-friday-fermi-problem.html

Assuming you're not in a big lecture hall and the professor shuts the door at the start of class, how long does it take for you and your classmates to deplete the oxygen enough to feel it?

The elevator problem basically... I've always thought this depended on exhale, not inhale.. almost a trick question.


Now populate the classroom with 34 students and 1 teacher. The 35 occupants consume 15.3125 liters per minute. Now for the final calculation:

2625 L x (1 minute/ 15.3125 L)

It will take about 171 minutes, or 2 hours and 51 minutes for the room to become unbearably stifling. You can image that you'd start to feel pretty uncomfortable about an hour and a half into the lecture—a good argument for shorter classes.

BUT!.. CO2!

I know I'm being very vague here... it's late, and I'm not on top of my game. But check out the Fermi problem.. it's really fascinating.. so many variables are involved despite trying to keep variables down. Anyway, the Fermi problem extends well beyond this physics app, obviously.

Murray Gell-Mann

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/apr/17-man-who-found-quarks-made-sense-of-universe/

He and Feynman did not get along, unfortunately... I love Feynman, a special talent no doubt. Gell-Mann is something in his own right...

--

Did you find it strange that Feynman became such a celebrity?
Feynman was a peculiar case because he was a very brilliant, terrific, successful scientist, but he was also a clown. He was more of a clown than he was a scientist sometimes.

But you and Feynman could get into really deep conversations about physics. You were well matched, weren’t you?
For some years, and then I got fed up with him. He was just so turned in on himself. Everything was a test of his brilliance. So if in discussing things we came to some interesting conclusion, his interpretation of it was, “Gee, boy, I’m smart.” And it’s just annoying, so after a few years I just wouldn’t work with him.

--

Murray Gell-Mann

...beauty is a very successful criterion for chosing the right theory...




This one is great too.. close to my field-ish. Do all languages have a common ancestor?

Merlin Donald, an absolutely brilliant free-thinker, and my thesis adviser and teacher, thought about this a lot. Such a great topic! Recently visiting Iceland and falling into the Gaelic language, learning that it came from nordic, knowing that the geography prevented Latin influence... sort of a side branch of what we use here, ugh.. just like our genes... split, etc.. pretty good. More if you talk to me about this here... I like this shit. Merlin postulated that language came from gossip (trying to communicate about other events, people), which I adhere to, but it's a bit more complicated then that.. (geographic?) bottlenecks, as addressed below.