Saturday, April 9, 2011 Lethbridge

4:50 am tag: Morning Musings

Yesterday I slept in. Today I am up early.

The temperature at the moment is -2 C, but with a slight breeze it feels like -7 C. The last few days have been very cool. It certainly takes the edge off being outside unless one is bundled up.

I received an email from a friend who is much more knowledgeable about birds than me suggesting that another possibility for the hawk I saw on April 7 is a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk. That hadn't occurred to me. Hawks and Gulls are two really difficult orders as the birds have quite different looks as they go through the first few years of their life. But he also said that the id of it being a Cooper's Hawk made sense as well. I will stay with that for the moment, but will continue to read and search the web.

I am receiving encouragement from another friend to include more photos, of everything, not just birds. There is merit in this as it forces me to pay more attention to what I am seeing, or not seeing. Morning light is particularly good for photography but morning temperatures are another matter.

There is a nice quote from the novel I am reading at the moment where the boy is talking about his keeping a journal:

"Well then. One can only hope you are writing it all down.."

"No, sir, only some of it. On the interesting days. On most of the days it's along the lines of a bad novel with no character learning any moral."

"The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver, p. 75.

Even a good photo doesn't compensate for this, and a poor photo is only adding to the misery. On the other hand this is a journal, not a work of art.

As I have developed this new version of the website I have added "Activities" as they have occurred. Reviewing the list, which one might argue is already too long, I notice that two of my favorite interests are missing: mathematics and science.

Early morning is prime time for both activities. It is quiet and I am, after a cup of coffee, awake. I must deliberately set aside at least an hour each morning for this. Beginning now.

But before I do, I just took a photo of my cup of coffee. Neat. Here it is.

The image in the coffee is a reflection of the light bulb in the ceiling. Note that the cup is in focus but the reflection is blurry. Here is another photo:

Now the reflection is in focus but the cup is not. Parenthetically, the images of both are always in focus when I am looking at them.

While downloading these photos I noticed a couple of pictures that I took while walking around Nicholas Sheran park a couple of days ago.

Notice the S-curves. Here is another.

More S-curves. Maybe I will make a photographer yet.

Now for a little math.

7:30 am tag: Mathematics

The last hour has been very satisfying.

I found my notes from the last time I looked at Gilbert Strang's text on Linear Algebra. It was on January 28 and I was on page 20.

This morning I began again at the beginning and at the end of an hour had made some notes summarizing the main ideas in the first section of chapter 1 and I am now on page 6.

As I have commented on before, I enjoy doing mathematics with a fountain pen. It is all part of the aesthetic, the beauty of the subject demands this approach.

This high-tech environment is not well suited to mathematical notation, partly because of the notation itself, but also because one often wants to sketch a diagram. I could stop at this point but there would be no sense of what I actually did. Thus I will add a scan of my notes.

Three quick comments. There is no actually "doing" of math on these two pages. It is simply an attempt to set down the important ideas. My next session should involve efforts to apply these ideas to various situations. And my fingers are not frozen as they were a couple of mornings ago when I was at Henderson Lake taking photos of birds.

Here are 2 photos that I took at the end of this session: