Searching for contentment
This is what fascinates me most in existence:
the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.
– Philip Gourevitch
epigraph to Blindsight by Peter Watts >
Reading: Peter Rock, My Abandonment
Well narrated by Tai Sammons
This is one of those unusual instances when I watched a film and was so deeply touched by it that I decided to read the book it was based on in order to dive a bit more into the story. I was surprised to discover that while much of the film tells the same story as is revealed in the book, the ending diverges sharply, going in a quite different direction.
The book was "inspired by a true story." In both the book and film, the girl who is the focus of the story, who narrates the book—Caroline in the book, Thom in the film—is a fascinating character study, revealing a wonderful strength and depth of individuality, and a clarity of vision as she observes the world around her, both in the woods and city. Both versions of the story are well worth experiencing.
Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie plays Thom in Leave No Trace
The film—directed by Debra Granik and written by Granik and Anne Rosellini—adds some extra dimensions to the story: the performances by Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, who plays Thom, and Ben Foster, who plays her father, are exceptional; the cinematography by Michael McDonough is exquisite; the revealing of the father's PTSD is deeper and fuller; and the inclusion of some wondrously quirky additional characters in the final part of the film is heartwarming. I definitely want to watch this film again someday, which is quite rare for me.
Book: Blackstone Publishing, 2009, Downpour⩘
Film: Leave No Trace, Bleecker Street, 2018
More recent reading >
Contemplating: The Story of Us
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Illustration by Tim Urban
The Story of Us⩘ is a fascinating long read from Tim Urban—the brilliant and entertaining storyteller and illustrator behind the Wait But What blog. I now understand our world, which so often seems entirely insane to me, a bit better.
A few years ago, Tim gave what turned out to be one of the all-time favorite TED Talks: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator⩘ , during which he introduced the Instant Gratification Monkey, who exerts a large influence on many, if not all of us, and who went on to become an endearing plush toy.
Not being a TED Talk junkie, I hadn't previously seen this talk, so it a was delight to be introduced to the ideas Tim shares through it.
Wait But What: The Story of Us by Tim Urban⩘
More recent contemplations >
Living in the Rockies
When I reach the halfway point of my daily walk and turn around, this is the view that greets me. A bit different every day, it almost always invites me to pause for a few moments.
If I don't get too lost in my thoughts and stay aware of my surroundings, I also see this beautiful moss covered boulder nestled in the wild grasses along the way.
Higher res version of this photo >
More recent photos >
Woodworking: Windtraveler lamp
Dedicated to my good friend Thomas Hey'l
who has inspired me to look at design more deeply
and to take even more care about precision.
More about this project >
More woodworking >
Tool reviews: Window tools
For someone like me, owning a home for twenty years means I've done just about every kind of handyperson remodeling and repair job imaginable, from plumbing to electrical, painting to insulation, and on and on. But one thing I had never needed to do, thank goodness, was to replace a large double-pane piece of glass. We did replace all of the windows in the house when we first moved here, but never the glass in an installed window.
Then one day I was out doing something I've done for many years, using a grass trimmer to cut down the tall grasses growing where we hang our clothes, and suddenly I heard a crack followed by a very strange sound. I took off my ear protectors and discovered that the sound I was hearing was of a large sheet of tempered glass forming thousands of cracked pieces spidering outward from where a stone my trimmer had kicked up had struck it. See the large vinyl windows in the background of the following photo? It was one of them. Oh shit!
More of this tool review >
More tool reviews >
Ham radio: Reflections of an amateur⩘
Although I'm still relatively new to the universe of amateur radio, where there are active hams who have been playing around with it since the 1950s, I've already enjoyed enough interesting learning experiences as well as stubbed my toes enough times to have gained a few insights. I'm a non-technical user figuring things out as I go along, and I'm writing these articles as my way to keep track of what I'm learning (and also just for fun, as I love writing as much as learning). Basically, this is info I wish I had found online when I was browsing for insights: AmateurRadioNotes.com⩘ .
Playing with Pi-Star⩘
More amateur radio⩘
Perspective
Sharks kill an average of 10 people per year. People kill around 100,000,000 sharks per year 1. People also kill approximately 425,000 people per year, topped only by mosquitoes, which kill about 725,000 people per year 2.
And we worry about sharks?
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People walk at an average pace of about 2.5 miles per hour.
Meanwhile, light travels about 186,000 miles per second, or about 11,160,000 miles per hour. It would take light about 0.13 seconds to travel around the Earth,
1.3 seconds to travel the 238,900 miles from the moon to the Earth,
8.3 minutes to travel the 93,000,000 miles from the sun to Earth, and 1.3 hours to travel the 890,000,000 miles from the sun to Saturn.
At the scale of the solar system, the Earth is a spec of dust (1,300,000 Earths could fit within our sun).
Our sun, as big as it is, is just a tiny twinkle of light in a suburb of the Milky Way galaxy. Its light takes 28,000 years to travel to the center of the Milky Way.
One light year is just short of 6,000,000,000,000 miles. The Milky Way has a diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 light-years, and contains between 100,000,000,000 - 400,000,000,000 stars, which together create a smidgen of light in our local group of galaxies.
The light of the Milky Way takes about 2,500,000 years to travel just to the nearby Andromeda galaxy.
The observable universe is estimated to contain somewhere between 200,000,000,000 - 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies.
And we worry about anything?
All distances and times are approximate.
Inspiration: "New 3D map of the Milky Way shows we live in a warped galaxy," NBC News, Feb 5, 2019.
A related video: Hubble Legacy Field Zoom-Out.
Another related video: The Exhilarating Peace of Freediving by Guillaume Néry (really, it's related).
Related project: A team of five French amateur astrophotographers has assembled an amazing gallery of deep space images from their observatory in Chile: Ciel Austral, which means Southern Sky.
Image credits:
- Hiking trail in Cow Creek valley by Toshen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
- Blue Marble, 2012, Earth image by NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
- Full moon image by Toshen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
- Saturn by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
- Sun, from the video Fiery Looping Rain on the Sun by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO
- "The Milky Way in Yosemite" by bgwashburn is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
- Milky Way in Summer: "VL test PSP8" by gjdonatiello is licensed under CC CC0 1.0 (cropped)
- Andromeda by NASA/JPL-Caltech
- Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF): NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team
