Journo for Burdo
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Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in the "burdo" journal:[<< Previous 4 entries]
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08:54 pm
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A walk along the river
While living in London, my brother and I would spend the weekends taking long walks through various royal parks, woods, and abandoned train lines. Even without going beyond the city's transport we were able to escape the city. One weekend we went outside the M25, starting in Windsor and walking along the Thames past Runnymede all the way to Hampton Court Palace.
I decided a similar journey in Edmonton would be an interesting afternoon, a 20 km walk along the river from the suburbs to the city centre. Four of the five hours were spent without touching a road or seeing anything urban except a few houses (though a thin strip of trees was sometimes the only gap between suburbs and me).
I created a Google Map of the journey, with notes and photos.
View Afternoon walk in Google Maps
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05:34 am
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Knowing everything, or thinking on things
First wikipedia, now Google's plan to scan every book, the connected world increasingly gives us access to all the knowledge in the world. Which is great: no more memorization, no more rote learning. Previous generations dedicated years of their eduction to the task of embedding great stores of lists into their skulls. Now we have it at the touch of a button. But having things at the touch of a button can have its downside. By freeing our mind from the task of memory we lose the ability to remember, we become dependent on the machine.
But there's something else missing. When we don't have instant answers, we're reliant on problem solving skills to build estimations of the answer. When we're not sure what a word means, a little rumination on similar words, a touch of latin, and thoughts on etymology can yield a sensible guess. Similarly, wondering how long it would take to fly around the world, with a touch of knowledge about size (how wide is a time zone?) and some thought bring a useful if approximate answer. Its great to be able to check the veracity of the estimate with an internet check, but taking a stab at it first is a useful practice.
Like so much its a balance: having to memorize everything is a drain on memory, having answers instantly takes away the practice of problem solving.
***
Unrelated (perhaps) to this, I've recently been pondering gravity. Gravity is something we all experience, observe and incorporate into our sense of reality, from birth. It even forms the basis for common ideas in language (such as primary metaphors) and in imagery and design (as when slanted lines seem less stable than flat ones).
But looking at something that everyone sees can lead to insights no one else has made. Gravity's most famous example of this involves an apple and a man credited with the discovery of gravity itself. There's something about the apple story that's always bothered me - what exactly was it that Isaac Newton realised when he watched the apple fall? Surely it wasn't that apples fall. And surely it wasn't F=ma either - it seems likely that more than one falling apple would be required for that. Anyway, after thinking about it, I looked up the answer.
Newton knew that an apple on a small tree falls down. And an apple on a higher tree also falls down. But is there a tree so high that the apple on its highest branch won't fall down? Newton's insight was to wonder just how far the pull of gravity extends. As far as the moon, perhaps? Because if it did, then the observed motions of the planets might be explained using only the gravitational pull of the sun. And that meant a universal law of motion.
The reason I was thinking of Newton's apple story was after reading about a similar story, from the "Swiss patent clerk" who overthrew Newton's system. Curiously he too was effected by observing gravity in action. His moment came from a more unfortunate subject than an apple: a housepainter fell from the roof of a house in Zurich. Einstein witnessed the event, but saw a small detail whose consequences had escaped any of those who had noticed similar events before: the painter's tools fell with the painter. The painter and his tools were floating, in a sense.
From this Einstein created a thought experiment. It had earlier been realised that motion is relative: an experiment performed inside a box on a steadily moving sailboat will seem the same as one carried out in a box on land. Einstein's thought experiment extended this 'principal of relativity' to include acceleration. If the box was in free-fall toward earth it should be indistinguishable from a box being pushed through space by an accelerating rocket. A person inside the box would be unable to tell the difference. This simple insight is the core of General Relativity - it allowed Einstein to extend his earlier special relativity for motion to a general relativity for momentum.
Even more curiously, Eistein was actually incorrect in this case: there are experiments that a physicist in a box can perform to determine if the box is effected by gravity or a rocket's acceleration. But the underlying idea that Einstein had grasped from this thought experiement remained true despite the faults of the thought experiment that led him to it.
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10:04 pm
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Easter 09 - hike to the roof of Africa: Mt Kilimanjaro
The day before flyingto Tanzania: at the world's deepest (diamond) hole, Kimberley
Us in a recreation of a diamond mine
Day of the hike: making friends with a chameleon
The porters preparing supplies to carry up the hill
Buying park permits
The entire crew, just a few metres inside the gate
First night's stop
Monkeys in the trees by camp
Teaching frisbee to the porters
Day 2: the vegeation starts looking like a mountain
Preparing the gear (on the summit day I wore all of this)
Sunrise on day 3: our first sight if Kilimanjaro
On the road toward Kili
Mt Mawenzi, Kili's little brother
Chief guide and a plaque for a friend of his who died on the mountain
Strolling ever upward
Chilling with one of the two assistant guides
Day 4: Vegetation gets sparse
Mountain living
Summit day! Early morning but we've been up since midnight. This is me sleeping at Gilman's point, as high as I could go. I slept for ten minutes...
... then was woken for a photo and we went down again
Trav and his guide made it all the way to the summit (as did my flag)
View from the summit path: Kilimanjaro's glaciers
Safe and sound at the bottom again, the porters and guides are paid
Two photo's stitched, looking down from Gilman's point onto Mawenzi (Kili's lil bro)... Summit day meant walking from the valley between the two, up to where the photo was taken (and further for the summit) and then back again and then onward further all the way to the other end of the valley.
Note, that its just possible, following the horizon in this photo (covered in clouds) to see the curving of the earth
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03:16 pm
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Some photo pages
Since I haven't any entry to write, here's links to photos posted to that other online sharing tool
The Folks visit Edmonton
A video from the above:
Levi and Katrina's wedding
A video from the above:
Btw I am currently writing code for pay (nice), reading books on science, and playing this.
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