Monday December 4, 2006 6:40 am Lethbridge Sunrise 8:10 Sunset 16:33 Hours of daylight: 8:23

A. Morning Musings

6:30 am It is +3 C at the moment with a high of +3 C forecast.

From rear window	South patio
Both images taken at 2:00 PM

 

B. Plan

Immediate
Health	Walk & exercise	1 hr
Mathematics	Read "Fearless Symmetry" chap 9: Elliptic Curves	1 hr
	Make notes on the beginnings of number theory	1 hr
History	Make notes for "Citizens"	1 hr
GO	Complete reading "Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go" Volume 1	1 hr
Literature	Continue reading "Virginia Woolfe: The Inner Life" by Julia Briggs	1 hr
	Begin reading "Selected Works of Virginia Woolf" - Jacob's Room	1 hr
Science	Read "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman"	2 hr
Later
Chores	Investigate water softeners for home
Technology	Read manual for cell phone
	Make notes for chap. 4 of "Switching to the Mac"
	Begin reading "iPhoto"
	digital photography - learn about using the various manual settings
Philosophy	Read "The Art of Living" by Epictetus
Mathematics	Larson "Calculus"
	Read "Symmetry" by Hermann Weyl
	Read "The Computational Beauty of Nature" Chap 3
	Gardner "The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles"
History	Watson "Ideas"
Model Trains	Build oil refinery diorama: add ground cover
	Assemble second oil platform kit
	Assembly of CN 5930, an SD40-2 with a NAFTA logo
Puzzles	The Orange Puzzle Cube: puzzle #9

C. Actual/Notes

11:00 am I continue to be amazed at the workings of my mind. The morning began with a look at "Creating Esher-Type Drawings" (1977) by E. R. Ranucci & J. L. Teeters. This was a result of last night's skim read of "M. C. Escher: Visions of Symmetry" (2004) by Doris Schattschneider. The underlying motivation was further interest in symmetry. The Ranucci & Teeters book is one I remember from 30 years ago. It provides a spectacularly clear description of the ideas underlying various symmetry operaations without getting bogged down in the notational conventions of mathematics. I went through the entire book in less than an hour. Then I went for coffee with "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman" (2005), edited by Michelle Feynman. I am definitely a fan of the Feynman literature. This book is no exception. It is full of diamonds (although all diamonds are in the eye of the beholder). For example:

• "As Oscar Wilde observed, 'The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second duty is, no one has yet found out." [p. xii]
  
  
• "Feynman was emphatic about encouraging students to feel free to pursue whatever most interested them, without worrying overmuch about curriculum demands, the opinions of their elders, or the need to land a job." [p. xii]
  
  
• Feynman urged that 'he must have freedom to pursue his delight.' " [p. xii]
  
  
• "To a woman who fretted that she had studied physics in a relatively haphazard way, he responded, 'So much the better ... study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.' " [p. xii]
  
  
• "I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong." [p. xiii]
  
  
• "Neils Bohr's dictum, 'Never express yourself more clearly than you think.' and of Caarl Friedrich von Weizsacker's saying of Bohr, "I have seen a physicist for the first time. He suffers as he thinks.' " [p. xiv]
  
  
• " 'In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.' " [p. xvi]
  
  
• "At every fork in the road, we took the road in the worse condition, the one that looked the most interesting to us." [p. xix]
  
  
• "He was a staunch believer in public education but invariably had his frustrations with the bureaucracy and its inflexible thinking." [p. xx]
  

D. Reflection