Art – Survivor to Software

A Thousand Furlongs of Sea

We must learn not to disassociate the airy flower from the earthy root, for the flower that is cut off from its root fades, and its seeds are barren, whereas the root, secure in mother earth, can produce flower after flower and bring their fruit to maturity.
–Kabbalah

Generally speaking I work behind a desk eight hours a day (OK, more like 12) but once in a great while I will get to go out with a field crew to do actual physical work. While physical labor is generally pretty scary stuff; I love getting out-of-doors. My most recent excursion was to the western side of Oklahoma on a GIS mapping project.

I have driven through the panhandle a couple time previously but really didn’t spend any time there. It is absolutely BEAUTIFUL. For someone who is used to the lush green of the Ozark mountains; the naked beauty of the gypsum hills and high plains was like landing on another planet. This trip was actually months ago, but I forgot I had taken pictures until today. You can check out the photo gallery by clicking the link below.

Oklahoma Gypsum Hills and Eastern Panhandle

From What Dreams May Come

Harpers online has a well written, and thought provoking, article entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence.” It is about plagiarism and the role of influence on creative work. Besides, rare is the author that can reference both The Simpsons and Heidegger in the same article.

Matrix: The Real Story

With the next Wachowski Brothers move hitting the theaters, its time to take a second look at Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolution. Now you can find out “The Real Story” behind these two Matrix movies. Ok, maybe its not the real story; but it should (and possibly even could) be.

My Music

I added a new side-bar link to Vault. Audioscrobbler is a site that collects information on your listening habits. You can use it via a plug-in available for most applications. I use amaroK a KDE music managers that is the first such tool, on any platform, to support Audioscrobbler out of the box (if you enable it.) As an FYI, I actually have a licensed copy of iTunes that I got with my iPod. AmaroK’s iPod support is better than iTunes… just another reason why amaroK is the best music manager on ANY platform. Here is a picture of my current amaroK setup/play-list. Take note of the pop-up album announcement at the top of the screen.

UGO Movies

UGO has released their top 50 DVD’s of all time. The list is probably one of the better “geek” movie lists I have seen, and is a lot of fun to go through. And, of course, Lord of the Rings extended edition comes in first (as it should!) What really blew me away was that I have not seen a few of the movies on the list. I am listing the ones I have not seen to prompt me to fix that situation:

The Killer – This will be a hard one, my wife hates John Woo.
Jackie Brown – The only Tarantino movie I have not seen.
Dawn of the Dead -The original.
Memento -I may actually have seen this, but if I don’t remember it doesn’t count.
THX 1138 -Yes, I know I said I would see this, but I haven’t yet. Word has it that George screwed the DVD remake of this movie too.

Its a dirt thing

My wife recently completed a trip to New Mexico for her geomorphology class. The class to a couple dozen pictures of their work so I decided to post them for the class and anyone else who might be interested. You can find the picture gallery here.

Just saw a preview

Just a personal note, I really need to see THX 1138. I know I should be scared of movies that George Lucas makes, but it looks pretty cool anyway.

Photography by Kelly

Had a good buddy of mine send a link to his AOL photo album. Go ahead and take a look, you can view lots more pics if you do a little URL munging: Page 44, Page 41, and Page 33.

The Web API

Joel on Software has a spectacular article on Microsoft loosing the API war, and how it will affect their OS dominates in the future. The trend that Joel talks about (the move away from rich client software development) is something that programmers have been talking about for years. The advent of advanced web technologies (like J2EE, and asp.Net) is only accelerating this move. How many of you use web mail?

Prime, not Optimus

I have spent a good deal of time lately thinking about prime numbers. A prime number is a number that is divisible by itself, 1, and no other whole numbers. For example 7 is prime because its divisible by 1 and 7 but not 2,3,4,5, or 6. Check out this link that briefly discuses the history and significants of prime numbers.

Some of the greatest mathematicians in history spent huge chunks of their life studying prime numbers; including Pythagoras of Samos, Euclid of Alexandria, Pierre Fermat, and Marin Mersenne. What makes prime numbers so interesting to mathematicians is that in math (the most structured of all sciences) primes appear fairly randomly. The density of primes can be calculated with some accuracy and there are some calculations that improve the probability of finding a prime number; but no one has discovered an algorithm for discovering the whole set of prime numbers.