Archive for March, 2007

Seriously, you have to expect the pun by now

“I don’t like either of you.”

I raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Have you been distilling sheep?”

Taking a lawn chair to the Sun

taking a lawn chair to the sun

…’though I can’t say I know why.

We Wish You a Happy Pi Day

There’s a John Adams Society debate tomorrow, so I baked my Pi-Day pie tonight. It is made with blueberries for three reasons:

  1. I believe that pies should be filled with fruit.
  2. Blueberries require less preparation than apples or peaches
  3. I was not impressed by the grocer’s strawberries.

blueberry pie

There’s a number you’ll want to derive.
Make a square and then measure one side.
Draw a circle in bounds,
take its measure around;
to get Pi: by the square-length divide.

Beep…beep…beep…

Every day, I do a lot of things by radio. I send contact and appointment information from my computer to my telephone. I make telephone calls. I unlock the door at work. People don’t seem to think of these things as radio—the technologies have other names: Bluetooth, cellular, RFID, or just “wireless.”

I realized today that I like referring to such everyday actions as by radio because my mental picture of radio isn’t mundane. Radio is humming transformers, glowing tubes, and dials with needles flicking back and forth. Radio reaches out a hundred million miles, a whisper bearing pictures of Saturn. Radio is a colossal tower standing astride the North Pole, sending waves to reach the whole Earth.

It tickles me that I use essentially the same thing to open my garage door in the morning.