Saturday, March 17, 2012

From Bagdad Chat Room

Bagdad Cafe

Glenn and I welcomed Julie to Portland at Tabor Hill Cafe.  She and Steve will be using the rental car to see more of what the Pacific Northwest has to offer.  They drove back from Pycon.

I've been doing some more thinking about what spin to apply to some of this geometry content, whether "coordinate system of nature" is too much hype.  As long as XYZ is not making that claim, I think we're past the point of needing to promote any human artifact too heavily or highhandedly.

The ISEPP lecture on Thursday reminded me of the importance of the power rule where omnidirectional growth is concerned.  Volume goes up as a 3rd power, surface area as a 2nd power, meaning S/V = 1/r, which is roughly how we see the melting point of gold changing, as we shrink down to fewer and fewer atoms, more like ... 162, 92, 42, 12, 1 (the reverse of what I usually give).

Matt and I met up for dinner at Barley Mill last night, visiting Palio (Ladd's Addition) for coffee.  Then I went by Food Not Bombs (SE 17th & Taylor) to check in with the cast.  We have an additional house guest from back east who was taking it in. I actually skipped eating as I'd just done that with Matt.

I snagged Perez Zagorin's book Francis Bacon at Hawthorne Powell's this morning, while running errands in the neighborhood.

I'm having a couple Irish coffees.  Physicians have a strong meaning for snakes, in bringing forward their caduceus.  Most Irish I meet are jovial about St. Patrick's supposed feat.

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