Tags

Color fatigue in cross-eye experiments, Cross-eye experiments, Red-green cross-eye experiments

The red-green blend cross-eye chart can be combined with with color fatigue to get a strange situation where the color fatigued portion of the visual image is doing a slightly different color reversal dance.

Red-green blend cross-eye experiment

Go the typical cross-eye experiments at Probaway.wordpress.com for more experiments and help on how to cross your eyes to get the weird brain effects. In this experiment begin the experiment by sitting well back from the computer screen, say two arm lengths, and cross your eyes so the two black dots fuse into one image. It helps to rotate your head slightly around your nose to screen axis, which will make the two dots seem to dance up and down relative to one another. That helps to make them fuse, but once they do fuse hold your head still for ten to thirty seconds and watch your brain try and make sense of the conflicting images. There will be a dancing of colors across the whole field of the flag.

After a minute of that strange fun move your head directly toward the screen until you are as close as your eyes will let you get without losing your fused dot. That will be about one foot away. After you practice that for a few times you can start moving slowly back and forth from you distant position to your close one without losing your fuse. Once you can do that successfully, remember rocking you head slightly will help you maintain your fuse, you can proceed to the new experiment.

Go out to your distant position and stay fused on the dot for a while, thirty seconds or perhaps a minute will do. The purpose of this is to color fatigue your eyes to the colors reaching each eye independently. After that fatiguing time move toward your screen about half way. A color fatigued image will appear around the dot, but that image will be smaller than the new flag image in your eyes retnia, and so it will behave differently from the portion of the flag that is still outside of the color fatigued area.

I think this proves that the dancing of the colors is taking place within the visual centers of the brain and not in the eyes themselves. The color fatigue is in the eyes, but the color dancing is in the brain.

Enjoy yourself and tell me what you see.

How to make an electronic brain.

Tags

An electronic brain

A challenge to the folks in Silicon Valley is to create a new type of computer which is similar to the way a brain works. What is needed to accomplish the effect, which normal functioning brains do, is a cell in which tiny transistor-like cells will store energy in a cumulative way but simultaneously in a continually draining away way too. Imagine a leaky water bucket with various sources of water coming in at variable but controllable rates and water leaking out at a known or controllable rate. The goal is to have the bucket like switch dump its specific load of energy only when the input flows exceed the output flows for some period of time. With electronic devices this could be a very short period.

Each of these input flows could be from variable buckets similar to the one described but at these previous input buckets there would be external input events which determine what these first level buckets are processing. The secondary buckets described at the top would only receive inputs from the buckets which had received external stimuli, but they would receive it in a discrete digital form from the input buckets. If there were only one level of input buckets, each bucket feeding a single second level bucket, it would change an analog gradual input into a discrete digital output. That wouldn’t be very useful because there are easier ways to do that by simply measuring the first level’s output. However, if the second level bucket was receiving input not only from the first level bucket but also from third level buckets, which themselves also got input from fourth level buckets, then this second level bucket’s tripping behavior would be affected some even by the fourth level.

What happens when there is a wide sheet of primary input buckets, overlaying a sheet of secondary buckets, and that overlaying a third sheet and that a fourth, a fifth and a sixth, is that the last sheet is able to make integrated decisions based on comparisons from the input from the entire sheet of first level buckets. Each sheet can make simple discriminations about what is going on in the sheets above it because it gets support in its tripping behavior from the sheets below it. After a few cycles of the information about the first level bucket’s input, the flowing to the bottom sixth layer bucket and back up would stabilize and the sixth layer could make statements about what the entire first layer was perceiving.

With traditional digital computers the energy entering a transistor is limited to within specific limits to reliably get the desired switching effect, but within this new leaky-bucket type switch the trip point might be precise but the inflow rate versus the outflow rate is what determines when the switching potential is reached and the tripping effect occurs, and that switching is controlled by several different inputs from the different levels.

This type of layered sheets of leaky buckets linked together would permit a kind of computing which is more similar to the way a brain works and would therefore be able to get some kinds of results more quickly than either a digital computer or a brain. It would be quicker than a digital computer because its decision trees are much shorter and it would be quicker than a brain because these would be strictly electronic effects rather than vastly slower chemically mediated effects.

The supernatural god humans seek may be the Void.

Tags

Escatology, Ultimate answers, God as Void, Supernatural void, Supernatural emptiness

Everything that exists sprang originally from nonexistence. This seeming nonsense becomes an obvious observation because everything we know didn’t exist at some time in the past. If we ask the simple question, “Where did that come from?” we soon realize that it came from some set of preexisting conditions. When we repeat the question over and over we soon see that everything came from some preexisting thing. We can continue asking that same seemingly simple question until we reach the conclusion that Lao Tzu reached in 500 BC. Things generate their opposite and at the beginning the opposite of something is nothing. The first thing was generated by its opposition to nothing. That sounds even crazier than things coming into existence from preexisting things and yet the known processes of the physical world have been explored to well within the first second after the creation of the universe using similar logic coupled with high energy experiments.

Thoughts are always associated with some physical substrate, which in the past were limited to electro-chemical reactions within a nervous system. Without the physical substrate there were no thoughts. With the creation of writing thoughts could be symbolically stored but it still required a physical substrate, usually called a mind within a brain, to process them and to become conscious of them. Now with computers reaching higher capacities they are capable of associating many things together that were previously thought of as requiring a human brain. It is all quite mechanistic but then at the root of human thought it is also quite mechanistic. The digital-bit computers will soon be, perhaps some already are, working by something closer to analog probabilities that have Gaussian like associations, or possibly have variable charge levels that must be surpassed in a period of time before they react. A leaky bucket decision process and not just a yes or no that digital computers use to compute. That seems to be how brains work. Biological brains are quite slow in detail but because of myriads of stored memory modules they process some complex things en masse very quickly. Once the proper arrangement of computer chip processors are created they may be able to do mental functions at near the speed of light.

When the emptiness of the void is at last reached and understood and the capability of generating things out of the void itself becomes possible we will certainly enter a new world for us living beings. The void brought us into being but it is impossible to know what this presently unknowable thing is or the limits of what it is capable of. For non-theists the void may be the ultimate supernatural entity and it is the thing to which they must turn for ultimate answers and help. This is possibly the supernatural thing which is testable and provable as opposed to the various god concepts which so far have failed the various tests.

The void is the source of everything including now and the future.

Gossiping women created human morality.

Tags

Gossip about morality, How to identify morality., The roots of morality, What is morality?

Everything about humans that was created in the last one hundred thousand years or so didn’t happen simply because of Natural Selection, or Sexual Selection, but primarily because of Evish Selection. This idea is based on the easy-to-make observation of the way humans choose sexual partners. Males are still primarily choosing their female partners based on a Sexual Selection strategy. They choose for physical beauty and based on that strategy the species has maintained a healthy condition. Health and resultant vitality of the animal body is attractive to potential sex partners, but when one becomes sick and unhealthy they are unattractive and have fewer children because they breed less. Sexual Selection changes the expression of the genes more quickly than Natural Selection, but both of these are very slow when compared to Evish Selection.

Women choose their mates only in part based on physical beauty but they choose their mates, hopefully to be their lifelong husbands, based on a large variety of other qualities too. Once the early human females developed the ability for rudimentary speech they began analyzing potential mates based on their combined verbal analysis with other women of the entire package of qualities possessed by the male potential mates. This selection process was particularly sensitive to the moral qualities of the men. The women would be very desirous of being protected by their potential husband, but also they would be very observant of how well he treated women. She would want him to keep unwanted men away but not at the price of being abused herself. Thus with a hundred thousand years of breeding with this as an important part of the selection criteria for a husband these moral qualities would be bred into the the human genome and human behavior, and we would see men of all the cultures of the world treating women with locally defined courtesy.

There are many facets which make up morality and there must be many genetically heritable genes underlying morality, but because of these genes people are now moral because it is now part of their genetic inheritance to be moral. We have bred into us the capacity to develop a refined and sophisticated morality just like we have bred into us the ability to learn and speak languages. These specific moral qualities are not fixed into the genes like the speaking of the English language isn’t fixed in the genes, but the ability to easily learn these things is there. We have at birth the ability to easily learn any of the thousands of languages spoken by humans, but we also have at birth the ability to easily learn any of the moral codes of the various groups of humanity. We are latent moral people from the beginning,  but we are also self-serving animals from the beginning. There is always a struggle going on within our behavior of how to balance the multitude of conflicting impulses. The basic animal needs for survival are always there to protect the life of the animal, but these necessities are overladen and often controlled by the human need to live within the strictures of human society and the genetically directed developments of a human moral code.

These moral genes were bred into us by our ancestral women choosing moral men just like they selected for men with all the other qualities that make humans what we have become as a species. Our innate moral propensity is as deeply bred into humans as is our propensity to learn a language. Of course we can do many things with our moral ability just as we can do many things with our languages. We don’t need much human interaction to learn basic morality, just like we don’t need much human interaction to learn to talk. Some people become wonderfully skillful with language and some people develop their moral sensitivities to a high degree too. Having a fine moral sense isn’t the same as taking graduate classes in ethics but it is an ability to see and do the best thing for our interbreeding group of people. To carry that idea to its conclusion would be to define morality as doing the right thing as discussed at some length by a group of gossiping women and marrying themselves and training their daughters to choose those men who possessed those moral qualities to the highest degree.

Human morality is based on carefully refined gossip entering our genetic code.

The Occupy Movement verses the real American elite.

Tags

Occupy Movement, Occupy Movement weakness, US power elite

The 99% are thinking of themselves as the disenfranchised because they think of the other 1 % as holding more than their fair share of the economies money. A much greater problem is the distribution of political power which is vastly more concentrated, but that goes unrecognized by the public. Two of the three top posts in the three branches our government are presently controlled by men chosen from a tiny group of Harvard Law School subgroup called Constitutional Law. Barack Obama the present head of the US administration who graduated from that roomful of people but so did John Roberts the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. There are over three hundred million people in the US but that super select constitutional law group is probably less than 1,000 people.

The current Occupy Movement is whimpering about the 1% having 50% of the money but they never even mention that the real power is controlled by a super select group. This means the government and anyone who wants to challenge any of its behavior must seek remedy from the exact set of unelected people who run the Supreme Court. Furthermore those Justices are chosen by the very people whom they are by constitutional law supposed to limit. This is an extremely inbred group of people supposedly monitoring and regulating their twin brothers.

Stated in generalized numbers this means 3,000,000 rich people make up the so called 1% who have the money. But the Harvard Constitutional Law graduates is a tiny number in comparison. I haven’t been able to get an exact number but 1,000 is a ball park figure and it may be fewer. It’s not 3,000,000 in control of the 300,000,000 people’s money that should worry us, but the 1,000 people slated to be in ultimate control of this same 300,000,000 people’s political power, and 7,000,000,000 world people, while still in school. The watchdogs and the bulldogs both come from The Kennel. It’s a very small kennel compared to the vast numbers of people they will rule. The watchdogs become even more ingrown because it is one of their own kennel mates, the presidential bulldog, who chooses the new Supreme Court watchdogs when an old one departs.

The Harvard Law School and especially the Constitutional Law branch is where the real political power bias resides and it’s 3,000 times more concentrated than the 1% monetary power that garners so much media attention. This excess concentration of political power problem should be addressed by removing people from public office who are part of that overly select group of power elite, and by having the Supreme Court Justices voted into office by the entire Congress rather than chosen by the sitting president. We need a more broadly experienced group of people running our government and the world.

That divestment of The Kennel’s power is a concrete issue in which the Occupy Movement might get some traction.

Of the 9 sitting supreme court justices 5 are from Harvard Law School
John Roberts
Stephen Breyer
Elena Kagan
Anthony Kennedy
Antonin Scalia

For a much longer list of this power elite power group see:

Harvard Law School alumni.

Even this long list is only a tip top of the power elite. Of course power soon converts to money and vice versa. The Occupy Movement’s foundation principles of absolute egalitarianism will easily be subverted and controlled by this super powerful elite. It has vast money, vast power and the absolute rights to control both of those entities to their very core. The Occupy moment is totally powerless as it exists. It has no power, it has no money, it has no media and perhaps worst of all it has no spectacular idea.

Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come but the current American idea is Freedom and it is controlled by the American elite. The Occupy Movement doesn’t even have a powerful idea.

Gods are volitional beings beyond our daily experience.

Tags

Order out of chaos, Our ability to think, What are gods

Variations on the concept of untestable volitional directing entities.

Gods are volitional beings beyond our normal daily experience. They seem to be in control of things which we cannot control. At least these unseen beings seem to be in control because we don’t perceive any beings that are in control. This presupposes there must be an intelligence of some type, at least some sort of intelligent volitional control behind things which we don’t understand, or else why would thing happen, why would apples choose to fall from trees, why wouldn’t they just float away, or explode – is there a directing being?

Ever since Newton we can understand with considerable precision why many things like gravity behave as they do. As the accumulated knowledge of testable science progresses more things come to be understood. What has been found in all of these cases is that there isn’t any volitional control, only the interaction of forces, each of which has an understandable and deterministic quality about them. It is only when these forces become too complex to follow that there seems to be some unknowable volitional quality making things happen. However, this feeling that there is intelligence and volition about these previously non-understood events has always been shown to be a projection of our own human need to have absolute answers – even if the answers are obviously made up just-so stories.

I was watching snowflakes fall after writing those paragraphs and occasionally when the air was calm they would fall vertically at their terminal velocity. But even in the calms between the turbulent winds there was a considerable amount of variability with each flake’s fall over a short period of time. The variations were caused by the irregular shapes of the flakes, as their tumbling would create highly variable drag forces on the edges of the snowflakes. Thus an individual flake when flat would fall slower but soon a tiny force would tip the flake and its downward friction-profile would become much smaller and the flake would appear to suddenly speed up, then something would change its drag-profile again and it would suddenly dart briefly in some other direction. It was all too complex to follow very well but if one could see each of the forces acting on the flake in very high resolution and in very slow motion its dance could probably be understood and even predicted for very brief periods of time. But these things in real time would be far too rapid for a human to predict.

Then of course there were gusts of wind caused by the general wind interacting with the swaying trees and creating invisible eddies of air which also affected the snowflakes and made their dance even more random seeming or controlled by some invisible god intentionally playing with these flakes. These invisible gusts made visible by the movements of the flakes themselves appeared to be random, but then of course if a super computer could follow each atom of the air in the gust all of the behavior would be seen to be mechanistic. But even if all the major and potentially measurable factors were known to high precision, the predictions for a given snowflake would only be for a few seconds of specific behavior.

The exact actions of a snowflake are mechanistic but they can only be predicted a short way into the future. Gross actions are different and they can be predicted, but in a different way. Say you chose an exact square foot of horizontal area 100 feet above the ground and were able to note snowflakes going through that exact place and then plot the time and location where each of those flakes landed on the surface below. After a large number of flakes had been observed landing they would form a circular target pattern in a smooth Gaussian-like distribution and you could say with some accuracy where a new flake falling through the hole would land, although you couldn’t be certain exactly where this particular flake would land. It would probably land near the center of the distribution but it might land at one side or the opposite side. You just can’t predict and even if you had a super-super computer you still couldn’t predict any better because there are so many tiny variables that affect the final result.

The world is made up of vast numbers of these kinds of variable actions and we can’t know how they will work out in specific, but we can know how they will work out in general. Our lives are made livable because of the smoothing out of vast numbers of these kinds of tiny events each modifying the others in a probabilistic way. The sum of these actions become understandable macro events. These types events are the ones we can learn to control and use to live our daily lives.

Because we as individuals learn to control these kinds of natural things we can be led to believe that other intelligences can control other events which are beyond our control and even beyond our understanding. We can be told, by authority figures, there is an intelligence so powerful it can control every atom in the entire universe, and that may be true but only in the second sense of prediction, that of macro control. If you took a voluntary deep breath you could claim to have controlled every atom in that breath to do as you willed but it would be true only in the vaguest of general macro senses. If you were to map even a single molecule of oxygen for the time it was within your body it would take all your consciousness for an hour to make a map of a single second’s three dimensional travel of that single atom.

It is unlikely that a conscious intelligence created the Universe, but even if that did happen that intelligence stepped away from further control, because the processes since that moment of creation are probably all knowable processes even if we don’t know them all in detail at the moment. And we may never know the finest details, not because they are unknowable, but because the research tools for finding them are too expensive to build. It won’t help humanity one iota to know prime physical factors to 20 decimal points of accuracy, but spending the amount of money to get that last decimal point would leave billions of people to starve for lack of resources.

Gods exist only in our imagination to explain the incomprehensible.

Visual music makes for a strange day.

Tags

Music and vision crossovers, Photographs of visual music, Rhythms of water

Visualization of music was on my mind today so I made these images as a muse to work with at some future time.

Meandering river creates visual rhythms 5 miles north of Gilchrest, Oregon.          Google Earth 43.542 -121.622

The various meandering of the Little Deschutes River as it flows just north of Gilchrest, Oregon, looks like a musical theme and variations on that theme. There are, without doubt, thousands of miles of meandering streams, but I wanted to stay close to home, so I captured this one from Google Earth.

This sunset reflection seems like music on water in blacks, blues and greens.

It is the rhythmic quality of these pictures which reminds me of music, but this is only one type of music. I can think of many other representations but I will put that off for a while.

What supernatural thing might a nontheist believe in?

Tags

Atheist and gods, Nontheists, Supernatural beings

The term atheist is annoying because it seems like a double negative. The term (a) attached to a word in English means not or against, so at first encounter with the word one might think the atheist was against gods. The term appears to cover all concepts of gods, not just the Christian one, or pre-christian ones like the Greek or Roman gods but any and all variations on the concept of untestable volitionally directing entities. It seems there must be a component, however small, of consciousness and willful decision-making by these postulated gods.

These gods perform supernatural actions and not just natural ones that are associated with testable physical reality. But, it is claimed, they somehow do interact with our physical reality, because if they didn’t there would be no way to perceived, they would be absolutely invisible, and they could be totally ignored. Sometimes even nature can seem capricious, but for a nontheist or atheist or perhaps a natural scientist these unknowable behaviors are tallied up to the specific details of random sloshings about of real things bigger than us and our perceptions or even our potential understandings. These atheists would accept being struck by a meteor as just exceptionally bad luck and not as an act of a wrathful god intentionally disciplining them for being uniquely bad persons or for some ungodly act.

An act which one would think would annoy a god and make him wrathful would be to use his name in vain, or to say he doesn’t exist or perhaps worst of all simply ignore him altogether. Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said, “The only thing worse than being spoken ill of is not being mentioned at all”? No – I just looked it up and he said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about..” It would seem the gods would be vengeful toward atheists, but even more so against those who totally ignored their existence. The atheists at least acknowledge the possibility of the gods’ existence, but then go on to doubt them because of lack of personally convincing proofs. The gods might rationalize their letting atheists out of punishments, because they, the gods, just didn’t want to bother with illustrating their power by performing some supernatural deeds for these atheists. The gods might also just ignore those people who ignore them. Why bother with someone who isn’t interested in you; it’s a waste of time and energy.

Those thoughts postulate the possible existence of gods, but what if that idea was just a string of words without any meaning — what if gods didn’t exist no matter how broadly you stretched the definition? If that were the case then an atheist would be against nothing whatsoever. It’s like saying I am opposed to nothing. This isn’t in the open-minded sense of being open to everything, but instead it’s the opposing of an utter vacuum in an absolute void. It doesn’t make much sense to be an atheist ( a — theist ) because it is against nothing.

There is one supernatural thing which nonbelievers could believe in if it were thought of in the right way, and that is the void itself. Everyone who thinks at all can wonder where their consciousness and being came from, why it is here and where it will go. What were they before they were born and what will become of them after their body is totally dissolved back into the universe and vanishes back into the void? This void is the supernatural entity of which we and everything we can conceive of has been created, is part of, and will vanish back into. It is the supernatural entity to which we should address ourselves when we ask for help, it is the supernatural entity we must cooperate with or be destroyed sooner rather than later. When we accept the void as our supernatural god we can get on with our lives as we see fit.

We came from the void, exist in the void and shall return to the void.

We need a list of locations and dates of spectacular natural events.

Tags

Camera time stamps, Google Earth locations, Location of beautiful photos, Nature photography, Timing of photographs, Timing of photoworthy events

The photographers in my Bend, Oregon, photo club have taken some spectacular scenic photos. I have gone looking for the exact locations of some of these pictures using Google Earth and comparing my friends’ online photos to those already online.

Kebler Pass Aspens in October – Google Earth 38.8613 -107.1638

This amazing picture was by Stuart L. Gordon. It illustrates why it is necessary to know the exact time as well as the location for making this picture, because every minute of every day the view will be different. This exact spot would be a fine place to have a webcam taking a picture every few minutes year around, as that would make a fascinating three-minute movie; or one shot a day, which would make a thirteen-second one.

A precise time stamp is needed sometimes or the picture, at least as seen, will be impossible to replicate. The picture below was taken at 1/14/2012 – 3:14 PM at 44.0606 -121.2831 All photos should have a clear time and location stamp.

View to the northeast from Pilot Butte, Oregon with shadow. 1/14/2012 – 3:14 PM at 44.0606 -121.2831. 

The shadow was moving surprisingly fast and the time frame for this picture was about a minute. If it were taken a minute after this picture, to get the head positioned as it is, there wouldn’t be any legs, as they would be shadowed out by the steps. And standing on the edge of the steps a minute later the head would disappear over the ledge.

Many pictures are very dependent upon timing. Obviously sports shots require exact instantaneous timing, but what I am referring to, at least for nature photography, is the timing of natural events. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a database of exact times and locations of spectacular visual events! Google Earth – click photo boxes – shows many pictures of interesting natural locations, but what we need is an ongoing list of these places so we can plan to be at those exact places at the right time. It would look like this previous post I made except there would be dates linked to the locations.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States

List	Links	Lat/Long	STATE
Mesa Verde	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	37.184,-108.488	USA
Yellowstone	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	44.461,-110.828	USA
Everglades	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	25.554,-80.996	USA
Grand Canyon	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	36.066,-112.117	USA
Independence Hall	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	39.949,-75.150	USA
Glacier Bay	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	61.197,-140.992	USA
Redwood Park	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	41.299,-124.013	USA
Mammoth Cave	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	37.182,-86.096	USA
Olympic Park	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	47.833,-123.977	USA
Cahokia Mounds	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	38.660,-90.062	USA
La Fortaleza	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	18.471,-66.124	USA
Great Smoky Mounts	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	35.655,-83.441	USA
Statue of Liberty	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	40.689,-74.044	USA
Yosemite	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	37.722,-119.642	USA
Chaco Culture	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	36.061,-107.962	USA
Hawaii Volcanoes	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	19.389,-155.106	USA
Monticello	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	38.010,-78.452	USA
Pueblo de Taos	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	36.439,-105.545	USA
Carlsbad Caverns	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	32.175,-104.445	USA
Waterton Glacier	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	48.999,-113.907	USA
Papahanaumokuakea	Flickr YoutubeWikipedia	25.77 -171.73	USA

Our first real snow here in Bend, Oregon

Tags

Easy living, Life in Bend Oregon, Snow in January Bend Oregon

We first saw our house without snow in February, 2011 on what was an unseasonably warm day. We completed our move on May 1st after two months of moving our accumulated stuff up from the Berkeley area in five one-way rental truck loads, the last one towing our car. The summer was quite comfortable but not hot and the winter was unseasonably comfortable also. Yesterday, January 17, 2012 was our first real snow storm. I drove two miles to a meeting of the OSU-Cascades science pub with some trepidation because it was snowing and the streets were icy. It turned out the lecture on the world water problems was very interesting and well worth the trip.

Today the snow accumulation was about six inches but it rained in the afternoon, which turned the snow to two inches of slush. Right now it is freezing so tomorrow morning will probably be very dangerous to drive unless you have studded tires. A lot of people installed their studded tires months ago but unless they headed up into the mountains they weren’t needed, at least here in town, until yesterday.

Retrieving our mail on a snowy day in Bend, Oregon

I made this picture from our front room of Debbie retrieving our mail.

Our life has been pleasant here in Bend. We had worried about the weather being too cold after decades of living in the balmy San Francisco Bay Area. But the dryness of living at 3600 feet, as opposed to the humid sea level cities, makes it easier to regulate one’s bodily temperature. We had worried a bit about living in such a remote little city of 80,000 people but with cable internet and HDTV it isn’t a problem. Also, there are enough events and people sympathetic to our interests that we are enjoying ourselves. It is strange, after living in the big city, to go downtown and randomly meet people on the street we know.

Later I pulled the garbage bucket through the snow for tomorrow’s pickup.

Even mundane things can have their interest and value.