Today was a simple day / A quick report for the smiles /
We went sledding in the afternoon. Joseph and Izzy wanted to build a ramp so I put on the MIT Chorollaries’ “The Engineers’ Drinking Song” and we built one.
Played a lot of ping pong, some epic battles with Noah. He’s up 32-22 wins/losses against me right now, it’s quite a war!
Pot pie for dinner, was delicious. Read an interesting article on Ribbonfarm about the “antiheroine”.
Had a few goofy messages with Grace that really put a grin on my face :D New Year’s party, here we come! Another reunion with homeschoolers after so many miles and so many stories.
After dinner we watched Gran Torino, which was terrific. So well done! Eastwood’s sense of pride in his work and character is inspiring. It’s something that’s harder to get in today’s more confusing world. But I still think there is a certain character and method to good research and thought, which engenders pride among its adherents, that I could take pride in. We’ll see!
After the movie, I drifted into Grandpa’s office, with Ken, who was heroically holding down the house’s entire IT department (setting up new systems, wiping old disks). I found randomly some cards detailing basic knots, some that I’d seen before. As I paged through the cards, I was struck by a sense of simplicity and necessity to the turns of the knots. Viewing the knots in terms of constraining the degrees of freedom of the string (so obvious!) led to immediate understanding. And I began to see repeated forms in each of the knots. The square knot consists of two interwoven doubling-backs (hitches?), and these doubling-backs occur in nearly every other more complicated knot. In every case, they must be constrained above and below or by a circular wrap. These simple considerations are nearly enough to reconstruct the bowline knot from first principles. It’s crazy, little discoveries in old territories. Towards Perfection, indeed. Though perfection itself be not perfect and the towards be like a ratcheting random walk in high dimensions, yet the notion brings a gust of smile over my face and fills the sails of my heart. Leeeeeeeeroy… and good night to all you engineers and philosophers!