Entering the zone

If you buy me enough drinks, I'll tell you how theoretical phsyics (which I've never done any of, really) is more like poetry writing (again, no experience) than you might think. It's not about the symbolic manipulations, the technique, it's the feeling you get as you put the pieces together. It could be like the feeling a chess master or indeed a martial arts master has when engaged in their art.

Deep in the comments of The Numerist Fallacy (an argument of the are-computers-real-art type from Grand Text Auto) you see:

“When I’m writing poetry, it feels like the center of my thinking is in a particular place, and when I’m writing code the center of my thinking feels in the same kind of place.”

Yeah! Everybody gets to this place now and again - artists, physicists, players, fighters - the ultimate creative space where the tools at hand disappear from the problem leaving only the mind to grasp the world, and change it.

Banana Guard

Way back in August, I thought of a neato idea that I didn't tell hardly any body about at the time: a special case for your banana, to preserve it from the slings and bumps of being outrageously chucked around in a rucksack. I dicussed it at length with Mrs DW -- make it, she said, that's a really good idea that people will pay money for. After all, who wants a bashed banana?

Baa! Na-ner, now somebody else has gone and done it first! I'll never be a soft-fruit carrying case tycoon now! To show there's no hard feelings, here's a Link.

Clearing

A cold morning start. My dreams were like Lem plots, and my sleep was not sufficient to slough off a week of screen-staring. Today, we’re going to Mike Sigman’s Internal Strength workshop, of which more on Repulsive Monkey in due course. The sun glances through a shivering beech hedge, much lightened by Autumn wind and rain.

I feed the cats with nutritious lumps of who knows what ocean fish. Some for you and – move out of the way dear thing – some for you. Poor things, they would starve without me. Wander into the next room for my camera (good light always makes me reach for it these days).

There’s a dark shape on the floor.

This is probably the worst feline murder yet. Apart from that blackbird a couple of years ago. That was the worst. The body has got a fat tail (it’s not a mouse, and rhymes with cat, fat, and mat), it’s been half chewed, and two spots of blood bear witness to a struggle. Plainly, the taste wasn’t to the victor's liking as, going back to the kitchen to get undertaking tools, I see there are vomited portions of it on various kitchen surfaces. How did I miss all that two minutes ago?

The body goes into a handy bit of cardboard packaging, and I collect the, um, bits (is that a little rodent foot?) into another bit of cardboard.



By now the culprit and his brother – it’s hard to tell which one, and they both have form – are probably curled up on the still-warm bed.