It's been a challenging time in my house this week due to some health issues. But I thought I'd post something that finally percolated today.
I've been watching my cat play and attack my duvet day after day - but there's nothing there! So as I watched, the following haiku bubbled up
today I attacked
the ghost of what I attacked
yesterday
To dive straight into the Livestream, here's the link:
And for anyone who wants the recap, keep reading!
And from a presentation standpoint, do it from the view of an incoming Executive.
A few ideas then came forward:
Deep breath. Crack knuckles. Shake things out.
Let’s get started.
As 2025 got ready to take over from 2024, he thought about the kind of year he wanted to create. He wanted to guide things in a certain direction but take into account that things don’t always go as planned. He wanted to set things up so as to reduce stress but still try to make this year better than last year.
So the first thing he did was to write his future self a letter to be read at the end of the year so as to compare notes with what was intended against what actually happened.
Dear Future 2025 (aka me),
As I ready myself to take on the coming year, that is to say, my namesake, I want to bring to mind and attention ideas and directions I want to highlight.
These items are in no particular order, but they are all important to me.
The first item on my list is to keep on collaborating with Aleesha. I really enjoy how my creativity has blossomed doing these collaborations and look forward to seeing where my creativity goes. And I want to do this work not with any creative goal or use of content in mind but instead for the pure enjoyment of doing the work.
As another item, I want to better react to unexpected and/or unpleasant situations. When I encounter a situation that is unexpected or unpleasant, I will do my best to remember my breath and take the time needed to breathe first before acting. The goal is to not react and instead to act mindfully. And when I fail to remember my breath, I will use that as an opportunity to remember my breath for the next time.
I will try to remember that music is good for my mental health. I will take the opportunities presented to play my loud, obnoxious music when I have the ability to take the time.
One last item for now (because I can always add more to this list) is to embrace my love of learning and of being a math and science geek/nerd/lover. I will continue to read and share things during these livestreams and make references to them in my writing because they are part of what makes my experience enjoyable.
For instance, I’m going to make mention right now that 2025 is the sum of the cubes of the numbers 1 through 9, which I think is really cool.
And that’s it for now. See ya in about a year.
New 2025
We started with the same picture prompt:
Aleesha drew this:
And Parz wrote this:
eager beaver fish
ready to take on the day
right after coffee
so adorable
his eyes are dreamy and
fish lips are a thing
all his enemies
kept at bay in the bay by
the anemone
does a clown fish dream
of one day becoming a
mother to babies
babies swimming
or adults served with lemon
fry
finding Nemo
a rare success story
most are never found
I see you
camouflage isn’t your forte
or is that the point
how does a clown fish
keep their whites so bright?
reef-safe bleach
group indecision
fins can be a challenge for
rock paper scissors
*****
“This is our little Morris. He was last seen in the vicinity of a friend’s house just a short swim from our anemone. If you have any information leading to the safe return of our precious child, please call your local authorities. You’ll have our undying gratitude.”
This plea from Morris’ parents echo that of so many fish who are bereft of family members. It’s heart-breaking to those affected by the recurring tragedy that so few take an interest in finding the missing fish.
The casually callous reaction of “If they can’t be bothered to care then why should I?” upon hearing that pictures of the missing aren’t published on the sides of milk cartons ignores the fact that watery environments aren’t conducive to advances in printing technology. But it’s the deliberately mean-spirited placement of those same pictures on packages of frozen fish sticks that really twist my gills the wrong way.
Let’s all work together to defeat this scandalous treatment of all fish. And to overcome the enormous coverup of this situation by the fishing industry.
For anyone who wants to dive right into the Livestream, here's a link to the video!
And if you need some convincing to watch, here's what happened!
It wasn’t what I was expecting. I mean, here I am, titular leader for calendar year 2024, with just a few days remaining until the new guy, 2025, takes over, so I thought I’d go check out where I’ll be residing in retirement. I had visions of comfy loungers, spa treatments, martini lunches… the things you’d expect an outgoing chief executive to be entitled to.
What I found was some prior executives crammed into a small meeting room, all fighting for space around a small conference call phone, all speaking at once, and all saying different and mostly conflicting things. I’d always wondered where the advice, the memories, the history lessons, sometimes welcome, came from.
This is where I’m going to be relegated?
*sigh*
It’s not like I was looking for some sort of executive Valhalla fasting hall. Ok… maybe something like an all-inclusive resort. But this? Oh boy, no.
At the very least, does the coffee machine work?
Aleesha put together a 9-box compilation of her favourite art from 2024. I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as she enjoyed making it!
The November (Patterns) issue of Moss Piglet's been out for several weeks, so I thought I'd share all the work I submitted and discuss my thoughts on each one.
(Click on the links for more information as to what Moss Piglet is and how to subscribe).
I submitted three works:
In smokestack shadow by steel rail fallow sprawls an eyesore sight
a building of sorts, ramshackle and coarse, hidden from ready light
Inside lurks a bar, sclerosis scar, decrepit watering hole
Shrug off your cares or nurse your despairs along with other souls
Filled to the gills with people who will every moonless night
enter the stage, drink swill, and engage with enervating delight
Like a Broadway show we all know where the cast slowly changes
but the action inside is fixed like the tide and never rearranges
The corner by the bathroom sty hosts the scripted drunk
Slurs his words, spills his drinks, smells hauntingly of skunk
He’s known as Cal, Our Churlish Pal, a character with multiple faces
They fill the role, all grim and droll, and come from many places
While waiting for another pour and its ever-flowing foam
Cal’s wife arrives and begins to strive to get the drunkard home
The bar sets odds which favour the sod who never scores a win
The losers all buy and winners they vie for the closest glass of sin
In the corner booth the patrons couth become a chattering crowd
Opinions unsound orated around become more shrilly loud
Watch the beginner become the winner and not be erudite
The best is considered the viewpoint delivered with volume’s greatest might
And what’s more through the door on the stroke of one
(no hair askew, so fresh and new, each incredibly so young)
a brand new face, so out of place, fresh talent for the scene
who may come back repeatedly more grayishly than green
There’s more besides who come inside all throughout the night
They come to drink and dance and drink and sing and drink and fight
It’s like they’ve ripped from published script directions for their role
Played perfectly yet accolade-free the only apparent goal
At time of close they collect their woes and shuffle out the door
I reset the space, put all in its place, so she’s ready to host once more
I grumble and grouse and to myself overbearingly complain
of dealing with stenches and miserable wretches and unbearable sticky stains
I could sell the dump to some ignorant chump as part of a sweetheart deal
in spite of her look as an opium nook, present her as a steal
Or my back could turn and I could spurn, as if she’d never existed
and ignore the allure to steadfastly endure that’s perpetually persisted
And then I crack before the shack in all her rickety glory
Remembering each night in better light the overarching story
Who else, I think, can serve the drink in only the way I can
and keep up her looks and update the books? Me, her loyal fan
The rise of the Sun, another night done, the end of my duty day
I’ll head to my bed and sleep like the dead until light has passed away
With those who’re new and the veterans too who come to play here still
I’ll play out my role but there’s one thing I know is I do so with free will
This poem was a piece that kept on insisting on being tweaked and edited and fine-tuned. Two weeks of lots of small changes finally produced this - and I think the results were well worth it! It went from having a few lines here and there with internal rhyme to having every line with internal rhyme in. I didn't realize at the time what a difference it would make but it just reads so much better with them.
Another aspect I enjoy is the use of words that sound like one thing but actually mean something else. The word "enervating" sounds very much like "energizing" but they are, in fact, opposites - energizing means the energy goes up but enervating means the energy goes down. It fits in nicely with the implied feel that somehow the bar is for the dead or perhaps the damned.
Undulations
Grey steely clouds relent from lashing sea
Wind-blown spray coats with salty brine
Oceanic undulations tossed the sloop mercilessly
Warm streaming rays calm restless rhythms
Where a watery grave seemed certain
It floats twixt watery depths and clearing skies
Ensconced, safely held deep within
She sleeps desperately, recovering
Gentle undulations the only movement
Limbs akimbo, exhaustedly thrown, unmoving
Where Death had prowled the deck hungrily
The Sandman stands guard at her bedside
The rise and fall of looming walls of water
Arrivals and departures of meteorologic events
Tossings and turnings of hapless watercraft
All part of an undulating Whole
Time’s Great Wheel inexorably spinning
The half-drowned figure allowed to wake
This poem arose from a freeXpressions prompt. I wanted to have each stanza look at a different version of undulations, of risings and fallings. And with the repeated rhythms, it seemed a good fit for Patterns.
In Search of an Einstein
In the world of mathematics, there are a lot of unsolved questions. Most of them are quite complex to express, much less understand. For example, one of the most famous unsolved questions, the Riemann hypothesis, runs like this:
The Riemann zeta function has its zeros only at the negative even integers and complex numbers with real part 1/2. True or false?
To a non-mathematician, it sounds like pure gibberish.
But there was one question that until November 2022 was unsolved but could be expressed in understandable terms:
I want to tile my bathroom. But I think squares and rectangles and all that are boring because it’s the same pattern over and over again. I want a single shape (it can rotate or whatever, but not overlap other tiles and not have gaps filled in with grout or other makeshift bits) because I don’t want to have to buy multiple shapes and end up with leftovers. And I want that one shape to completely tile the wall with a pattern that never repeats no matter how big my wall is. Can I get something like that?
In mathematician-speak, you’re looking for seamless aperiodic tiling - that is, tiling that creates a pattern which never repeats. And I do mean “never”. If you designed the bathroom wall to be the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, the pattern would still never repeat.
It was known that you could use two shapes to achieve the aperiodic look (found in 1974 by physicist Roger Penrose), but it was an unanswered question as to whether you could manage it with a single shape. In fact, the shape was so elusive that it garnered its own name - the “einstein tile” (“einstein” not coming from the famous physicist but instead from the German language: “ein Stein” meaning “one stone”). Many mathematicians simply gave up and moved on, figuring the shape simply did not exist.
But it’s now known that the answer is yes, the einstein tile does does exist. And, in fact, there’s more than one.
The first einstein shape was discovered by David Smith, a retired printing technician and self-described “shape hobbyist”. After years of playing with shapes inside a piece of software (the PolyForm Puzzle Solver) and then cutting shapes out of paper with promising candidates, he found one that looked likely. And despite what you might expect a shape like this to be - some sort of super-fiddly, highly-complicated, intricate shape requiring exacting manufacturing wizardry, it’s a 13-sided shape (composed of eight kite shapes that come together) dubbed “the hat” (because it resembles a top hat).
Smith contacted computer scientist Craig Kaplan, who along with software developer Joseph Samuel Myers and mathematician Chaim Goodman-Strauss, began proving “the hat” was an einstein. During that process, they discovered that they could change the lengths of the sides and still create a seamless infinite aperiodic tile. This meant that Smith had found not just a single einstein shape but an entire class of shapes. And within that class is an infinite number of individual einstein shapes.
What does all this mean? Aside from the possibilities within materials science, engineering, and countless other fields, the most important thing (or at least as it relates to the original question) is this - you and your neighbour can have uniquely tiled aperiodic bathroom tiling using einstein shapes (even if the store only sells one shape of tile).
References:
Bischoff, M 2023, ‘Newfound Mathematical ‘Einstein’ Shape Creates a Never-Repeating Pattern’, Scientific American, 10 April, accessed September 2024, <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/newfound-mathematical-einstein-shape-creates-a-never-repeating-pattern/>
Shields, J 2024, ‘The 'Einstein' Tile: Mathematicians Find a Shape That Never Repeats’, How Stuff Works.com, 16 April, accessed September 2024, <https://science.howstuffworks.com>
Shavit, J 2023, ‘‘Einstein Shape’: This holy grail of tiles will revolutionize material science’, Brighter Side of News, 8 April, accessed September 2024, <https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/einstein-shape-this-holy-grail-of-tiles-will-revolutionize-material-science/>
‘Riemann hypothesis’, Wikipedia, 4 September 2024, accessed September 2024, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis>
‘The Hat and the Spectre’, National Museum of Mathematics, accessed September 2024, <https://momath.org/the-hat/>
This is my first narrative non-fiction. It was fun researching and then finding a way to present what could be an extraordinarily dry bit of news and have it be fun. I hope I succeeded!
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