A collection of musings and meanderings.

Listen to my warm words of welcome.

From Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary:

Muse

• To think on; to meditate on.
• To be absent in mind; to be so occupied in study or contemplation, as not to observe passing scenes or things present.
• To wonder.

  Contrast with "amuse", which derives from the prefix 'a' and the root 'muse'. The prefix 'a' means "not". Literally, "amuse" or "amusement" means "not to ponder, think, or meditate". There is no evaluation, no critical analysis, no judgment.

Musing

• Meditation; contemplation.

Meander

• To wind, turn or flow round; to make flexuous.
• To wind or turn in a course or passage; to be intricate.

Meandering

• Winding in a course, passage or current.

These web pages have finally been rated! Proceed with caution!

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Read an Open Letter on Music in Church Worship.
Comments on music used in churches today.

The incomparable "Krazy Kat"

There is a Happy Land

Lyrics: Andrew Young, 1838
Tune: Leonard P. Breedlove, 1850

There is a happy land, far, far away,
Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as the day.
Oh how they sweetly sing,
Worthy is our Savior, King,
Loud let His praises ring,
Praise, praise for aye.

Come to that happy land, come, come away,
Why will ye doubting stand, why yet delay?
Oh we shall happy be
When from sin and sorry free,
Lord, we shall live with Thee,
Blest, blest for aye.

Bright in that happy land beams ev'ry eye,
Kept by a Father's hand, love cannot die;
Then shall His kingdom come,
Saints shall share a glorious home,
And bright above the sun
We'll reign for aye.

(Happy Land)

Check the current weather around Iowa and the nation.

Have you read the Declaration of Independence or the Consitution of the United States of America?
Other historic U.S. documents may be found at The Federalist and at the University of Oklahoma College of Law.

Here are pointers to some economic theory you won't get in that B-school!

• Richard Maybury's Uncle Eric Books, written so even an economist can understand!

• I, Pencil: My Family Tree on the interdependency of everything.

• What is Austrian Economics? and related links on Austrian Economics and Ludwig von Mises.

• The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net

On another serious side, here are several interesting and thoughtful articles on time, work, and life. They are found in the Forbes publication ASAP Big Issue III (November 30, 1998) on the topic of "Time".

Some of the articles in this issue were duds, in my opinion, especially considering some of the authors. But the articles below I thought were especially thoughtful and, well, timely!

• Michael S. Malone: The Mission Bell's Toll.
  "In the frenetic world of Silicon Valley, where the daily obsession is to shave a microsecond from every transmission, revision, and decision, a vital lesson about time lies unnoticed."

• Danny Hillis: Impatient Pendulum.
  "We are dazzled by progress, rushed by events, and disconnected from the stable rhythms of time. Our technology has isolated us from the natural cycles (day, month, year) that once governed the pace of life."

• Peggy Noonan: There Is No Time, There Will Be Time.
  "We fear, down so deep it hasn't even risen to the point of articulation, that with all our comforts and amusements, with all our toys and bells and whistles...we wonder if what we really have is a first-class stateroom on the Titanic."

• Jacob Needleman: Tempus Fugit.
  "In finding its own question of time-poverty, our culture is actually confronting the eternal question of the meaning of human life. What at first may seem like a problem unique to our era is, in fact, our version of a question written into the heart of human nature itself."

• Owen Edwards: Running Out.
  "To be able to do things faster, to accomplish feats of calculation in nanoseconds, to compress what once took months into a few minutes, is not to understand time."

• Pico Iyer: All the Times in the World.
  "In Shakespeare's day, time was 'the king of men,' and sometimes what we're losing, in our hubris, is a proper deference before a force that can wound as much as heal."

• Virginia Postrel: Patchwork of Old and New.
  "Progress, in this view, is not a matter of marching toward utopia, step by predetermined step, but the sum of countless parallel individual searches, each aimed at greater knowledge or happiness."

• George Stalk Jr.: The Time Paradigm.
  "Response time is the secret weapon of all businesses. In fact, a company's overall competitive advantage is directly tied to response time, more so than other performance differences."

• Ralph Nader: Supersonic Brain Shredder.
  "The march of time has been replaced by the blitz of time, and no one, short of a hermit, can escape the pace without some sort of defensive personal philosophy."

• Rick Segal: Death of a Day Planner.
  "The rooster needs no alarm clock; he is one. You've never seen a Swatch on a salamander. For all their documented intelligence, dolphins don't use day planners."

• Michael Rothschild: Profit by the Minute.
  "Overhead costs are time-driven, not unit-driven. Just as vertical integration had to be abandoned for the modern focus on core competency, the forces of information age economics will force executives to rethink the way they go about profit analysis."

• Stephen E. Ambrose: Instantly, Only Faster.
  "At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a nearly universal belief in the Western world in the idea of progress. As the saying goes, 'Every day in every way, things are getting better and better.'"

• Gloria Naylor: The Next Stop.
  "Different societies have different methods for dissecting the 'now.' In traditional African society, time is a companion that travels with you. In Senegal one may see people waiting patiently along the road for a bus that may or may not arrive that day."

• Daniel Schorr: I'm Late, I'm Late....
  "Time has become the new commodity - the scarcity of which is conspicuously displayed as a sign of status."

I built this animation using Interleaf graphics frames to draw the individual stars, Cyberleaf to convert the frames to gif images, xv to 'colorize' the black and white images, and whirlgif to combine the stars into an animated GIF89A format.	This is a much more ambitious animated gif. This "Interlocking Tori" animation was done by Bill Gosper using Mathmatica. Pretty neat, I'd say. (Using your mouse buttons or browser menu, "open this image" in its own page and it may run faster.)

Take a look at my "Ventriloquism Show".

(To get better sound, try stopping all of the animated images on this page by clicking on your brower's 'Stop' button.)

• You have the first move.
• Click on the position where you want to make your move.
• The Java applet will move next.
• Play until the game is completed.
• Click anywhere on the completed board to start a new game.
• Players alternate having the first move in new games.

A Java applet for a Tic-Tac-Toe game should appear here.

My TTT applet was originally developed in 1997 and is based on code from Arthur van Hoff (http://www.javasoft.com/applets/applets/TicTacToe/example1.html), Herb Jellinek (http://java.sun.com/applets/applets/Animator/Animator.java), and a Tic-Tac-Toe algorithm by an unknown source.

Make an online Lego guy!

	Read a rambling commentary on tools.

Peruse a list of my various publications.

The ever useful Periodic Table of the Elements.

Real Life and the Truth
Quotable Christian Quotes
Other Quotable Quotes
Canonical List of Math Jokes

Copyright © 1997-2002 by Elysian Fields Software^TM.

All rights reserved; some jabs and uppercuts are still available.

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Michael Cook, Proprietor