Dog Days

Murphy has taken, lately, to lying a bit oddly. He'll lie down with his left hip on the floor, but with his body twisted around so that his forelegs are directly under him and his head is resting on its right side. It looks very uncomfortable, but I've seen him sleep and dream in that position. He also does the mirror-image version. Well, whatever works...

One of my resolutions is to keep up with the recycling better. Among other things, I recycle the newspaper, letting it pile up until it's big enough to bundle. Unfortunately, procrastinator that I am, I tend to let it pile, uh, more. It gets pretty tall. Sometimes it tumbles, which frightens the dogs - and distresses me, since it's harder to re-pile than to pile. So this year, I'm going to keep on top of things. That meant, to begin with, getting rid of the current pile, which I did last night. Of course, seeing Daddy on the floor busily stacking papers attracted Murphy's attention, and he supervised for a while. Growing bored, he plodded off and came back with an old plastic bone. We played a slow-motion version of fetch for a bit: I'd toss it; he'd laboriously turn around, lumber over to the bone, pick it up, turn around again, and return. Tiring of this, he went and fetched Ben, and the two of them jointly supervised the rest of the bundling project.

This morning, I decided to get some exercise. (Another resolution...) I began with some running in place, in the bedroom where Ben was napping. He awoke and watched me carefully; when, tired of running in place, I started going in circles, he became... rather agitated, yelping plaintively. Murphy came in to investigate, getting underfoot and nearly tripping me. When I switched to jumping jacks, Murphy left, but Ben grew even more excited. It took quite a bit of petting to calm him down after I finished.

Ramble, Part 10: A Crash of Symbols

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead goes on to explain that thinking should be reserved for the decisive moments, rather as a general holds back the cavalry until their charge can have greatest effect. Whitehead wrote those words in 1911, and cavalry was about to become obsolete as an instrument of war, but I still like the metaphor.

Terminology matters. ("It's just semantics" - as if what your words mean wasn't a matter of supreme importance!) Notation matters. Good terminology and good notation (and those are two versions of the same thing) make thinking easier; they contain within themselves the compressed thinking of the past, so that we may expend our thinking-time in new areas. That's going to be the main theme of the next few Ramble posts, in several ways. I'm afraid, though, that the first round is likely to be rather dry, as the symbol-systems I want to look at are, well, things one learns in grade school. I hope that what I have to say will be of some interest; as a precaution, though, it's under the cut.

( The Things That Count )

Ramble Contents