Friday, May 27, 2011 Lethbridge

4:40 am

The temperature is +4 C, with a high predicted of +7 C.

From the Environment Canada website:

Today Rain. Amount 15 mm. Wind west 40 km/h gusting to 60 diminishing to 20 gusting to 40 in the afternoon. High 7. Tonight Rain. Amount 10 to 15 mm. Wind west 20 km/h gusting to 40 becoming light near midnight. Temperature steady near 6. Normals Max: 20°C Min: 6°C

Another day of unseasonable low temperatures. Coupled with high winds and rain, it is a poor day for outdoor activities of any kind.

6:45 am Birding

I have completed updating my birding files for our May 20 trips to Prince Edward Point west of Kingston and have submitted 2 more reports to eBird. That completes documenting our birding activities while we were in Ontario.

I have also done a little web surfing on Canon telephoto zoom lenses. The Canon EF 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L IS USM gets very good reviews.

12:00 PM Technology

I turned on the Dell Inspiron laptop and almost immediately began receiving messages about updates to various system software packages. This turned out to be much more time consuming than I expected as a number of the updates failed to install on the first attempt. Welcome to the world of Windows. After almost 3 hours I finally had everything up to date. Much of this was due to the gap between the present and the time when the software was originally installed on the computer in the Dell facilities. Hopefully this will not take as long to update in the future.

I then installed Ship It! This turned out to be a simple step. Good.

12:50 PM Morning Musings

Perhaps I should remove the word Morning from this section.

Anyway, I spent much of the morning sitting beside my new PC while it went through its paces of updating the software that it came with. And so I spent much of the morning watching horizontal progress bars and occasionally typing in a few characters to keep the system working.

Looking for something else to do between keystrokes, I picked up "The Beginning of Infinity", a book on science and how we create scientific theories. Deutsch makes a comment on a metaphor by Douglas Hofstadter in his 2007 book "I Am A Strange Loop", which I just happen to have, and which I have not got around to reading yet. So I quickly locate the book on my shelves and sit down again beside the PC. A couple of quick keystrokes and the machine is happy and I am ready to begin reading Hofstadter.

In the first few pages Hofstadter talks about a Peanuts cartoon which he includes. I remember this particular cartoon myself - it was one of my favorites. I remember retelling the gist of this story on many occasions to friends and colleagues. But first, in the spirit of Mark Twain's autobiography, a short digression.

Here are a couple of sentences from the Preface to Strange Loop.

"And one of my firmest conclusions is that we are always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experience." [p. xv]

"I don't think one can truly prove anything in philosophy; I think one can merely try to convince, and probably one will wind up convincing only those people who started out fairly close to the position one is advocating." [p. xvii]

Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy are lying on their backs looking up at some clouds in the sky. Lucy comments that one can use your imagination to see lots of things and asks Linus what he sees. "Well, those clouds up there look to me like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean ... That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eaking, the famous painter and sculptor ... And that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen ... I can see the apostle Paul standing there to the side...". She then asks Charlie Brown what he sees. "Well I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind." [p. xvi]

Hofstadter has used that cartoon throughout his life to remind him to speak and write simply and clearly. But as Einstein has said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.". Deutsch's book on science is a good example.

Finally, the PC has installed all of the updates. It only took two and a half hours.

Hofstadter again,

"... indulging in Pushkinian digressions into such variegated topics as Zen Buddhism, molecular biology, recursion, artificial intelligence, and so forth." [p. xviii]

Hofstadter, Twain, Deutsch, Penrose ... a perfect mix.

5:00 PM Model Trains

With the weather remaining truly miserable, it provided a good opportunity to begin setting up my Ship It! files on the new Dell Inspiron laptop. There are two phases to this which must be completed before one begins to actually try using the software to create switching lists. The first is to construct the underlying databases (towns, locomotives, cabooses, rolling stock, reporting marks, AAR type codes). The second is to set up the parameters for the shippers and consignees as well as for the 10 trains that I plan to run. So far I have created the databases for the 8 towns (Coaldale, Wild Rose, Queenston, Prairie Dog, Lone Pine, Distillery Row, Black Diamond and Jasper), the reporting marks (CN, CP, BCOL, NP, ONT, GN, UTLX, GATX, ...) and the AAR codes for the different types of rolling stock. This is all straight forward - the only detail is making sure that I have not forgotten any of the items. The same concern applies to the various locomotives, cabooses and rolling stock. The real work then begins as I specify the timetables for the trains as well as the details for the shippers and consignees.