Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Sunlight in the Clouds

    My desk at the new office is located in an interior room with no natural light. Both of my other coworkers like it that way, but as someone who regularly worked from my front porch at my last job, I can't stand it. Now I go on a walk around my neighborhood almost every evening, just so I can get some sunlight.

    A large cumulus cloud moved in front of the sun during yesterday's stroll. The last part of my usual route goes west, so as I approached my house, I saw the cloud face-on. The sun was just behind the edge of the cloud, so a very narrow strip of outline shone in brilliant white, while the sky above and the cloud mass below hung in a dull gray.

  • pine soap

    the pine soap bursts 
    in a bright white foam
    under bare feet 
    disappearing prints
    on soaking wet cotton weave 
    arms tender, knees sore
    a persistent horse fly
    as company
    

• Science

  • Unaccelerated Climb Or Dive, With Angle Of Attack

    I've been studying an old NASA book, SP-367, INTRODUCTION TO THE AERODYNAMICS OF FLIGHT, by Talay (Langley Research Center). I am interested in the flight equations, in order to understand aviation physics better, and with the idea of running the calculation or models on my analog computer.

    I had imagined that it would give me a general mathematical model that would explain movement of the aircraft in any given scenario. But instead, it gives a few equations pertinent to a few basic flight scenarios, including level flight, unaccelerated climb, unaccelerated dive, gliding, and turning. Page 140 gives the diagrams pertaining to unaccelerated climb and dive, and corresponding lift and thrust equations.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Techno-Therapy

    When most people hear the word “technology,” they think of business, productivity, engineering, and profit. They imagine software companies, office buildings, professional programmers, and applications designed to attract customers or generate income. Technology is often presented as a practical tool: something used to complete tasks, improve efficiency, build careers, or make money.

    But technology can also be something deeply personal.

    It can be a language of emotion, memory, imagination, and healing.

    Art has always helped human beings express what they cannot easily say in ordinary conversation. A person may write poetry to describe grief, paint an image to express fear, play music to release anger, take photographs to preserve memory, or write a play to explore painful relationships. Artistic creation gives shape to experiences that may otherwise remain trapped inside the mind.

    In my view, coding and programming can serve a similar purpose.

  • Using AI to proofread my entire capsule

    I like to think I'm a solid writer, but I completely suck at spelling and grammar. I just do. And no matter how many times I read something I've written, it seems like I can never see the typos and errors until after I've hit "publish". Spelling and grammar checkers are so-so, but most Markdown or other text editors I use to write gemlogs and such don't have syntax-aware checkers. So I mostly did without, and could fix typos as I found them in my content.

    Then 2 days ago, after (I kid you not) dreaming about my Gemini capsule, I had the idea to point OpenAI's Codex at my capsule's folder and tell it to do a careful spelling/grammar pass over all the Gemtext files, with this prompt: [...]