Art

My friend Tom left this link on a previous post about science and art: Bathsheba Grossman. I’d looked at her work before, but I don’t think I’d posted it. Science, math and 3D printing- what’s not to like?

Another friend, Eric, left an interesting comment on my post about November writing lessons.

Eric’s comment, reprinted to save you from wandering back and forth:

What NaNoWriMo was not good for this year: I did not write anything close to 50k words, generating about 10k if you include a section of notes I drew up.

What NaNoWriMo was good for this year: I figured out some things about my writing and how I ought to be writing, if I can just implement them and make them work. I learned that I probably need to start writing things backwards instead of trying to write one-thing-leads-to-another like George R.R. Martin or someone like that. I learned that I probably need to stop beating myself up if I don’t write any fiction on a day but still managed to leave a long comment on someone’s blog or elsewhere (e.g. a long forum post defending Star Trek, speaking purely hypothetically).

The big one was the “writing backwards” bit, if I can just teach myself how to do it. Though “not beating myself up” may be important, too: I think I’m realizing something similar to what you said about writing every day, and for almost identical reasons.

So I’m sort of feeling like NaNoWriMo was a “win” for me, even if it absolutely wasn’t even close in formal terms.

Eric and I have had long angsty discussions about similar issues before, and especially on the pros and cons of writing every day.

The moral: there’s no one true way.

This is important.

Irrelevantly, and tantalizingly, the day Eric left that comment he also wrote one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages. And no, I can’t share it with you, but if you ask nicely he might be persuaded to revise it for public consumption.

Changing the subject completely, this Counterexamples to an Old Earth came across my internet today, via Cheryl Morgan and several other people.

This is a fascinating and brain-hurting example of cherry-picking facts, extrapolating trends outside their proper bounds, and every logical fallacy known to philosophers. A number of the trends cited as evidence for a young earth are actually direct or indirect consequences of anthropogenic global warming, and thus relatively recent, but are warped into justification for recent creation.

And that’s leaving aside the factual inaccuracies, which are legion.

If I were still teaching, I think I’d use this as class discussion material.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m hip-deep in Django today, and kind of having fun with it. I’m evaluating candidates for the obsolete web application that broke when I upgraded my work server. It looks like it would take almost as much time to fix it as it would to switch to something current. Science involves a lot of background stuff that needs to be done just so you can get to the good bits, and data management figures heavily in that category.