Personal
What
Links to friends, and fun, with almost no organization.... but a great
deal of meaning.....
Why
"I link therefore I am."
(With apologies to Descartes.)
Where
We live in Miami at the moment. Of course, you're curious about
the world famous, beautiful
weather in Miami.
(This message brought to you by the South Florida Tourism Agency...)
Check it out, weather radar, forecasts, satellite images. As a reminder:
Miami is in the Eastern time zone, so during daylight savings time
(EDT) our local time is 4 hours earlier than GMT, and during standard
time (EST) we are 5 hours earlier than GMT. Now for a small dose of
reality; during June through November, we must watch for Tropical Storms
and Hurricanes headed our way.
The National Hurricane Center
now provides information through the WWW. Here is the
NHC's website with recent and current
tropical storm graphics index .
The Miami Herald also maintains a well organized and complete set of
WWW resources related to Hurricanes. Check out
Storm.Herald.com: Hurricane
Miami is also famous for its tropical flora so you may also be
interested in a link to our local botanical gardens,
Fairchild Tropical Gardens.
Physically, Miami (metropolitan Miami-Dade county) sits on a ridge
(maximum height 25 feet or about 8 meters) between 2 extraordinarily
precious environmental resources, the Everglades, and Biscayne
Bay. Biscayne Bay's (links later) beauty is is fairly evident, but the
Everglades has a more subtle beauty.
The Everglades National Park is home to abundant wildlife.
Photo by Richard Frear, courtesy of National Park Service.
Although it has a great deal of wildlife, some of which are unique,
I think the collective impression
of the Everglades was as a swamp with a negative, useless, conotation. A
local environmentalist,
Marjory Stoneman Douglas, wrote a book about the
Everglades which is titled "The River of Grass"
(first published in 1947). This book and its authors vision
were and are the most important events to change that collective
impression of the Everglades. It is difficult to see or understand
(Gestalt) the Everglades properly without this vision in mind.
Even with this knowlege, from the ground, it is a mostly featureless
expanse of tall sawgrass (light brown during the dry season) with
sparsely distributed islands of green trees (hammocks) with
little discernable structure.
The Everglades is known as the "River of Grass."
Photo by M. Woodbridge Williams, courtesy of National Park Service.
Furthermore
the heat and often overwhelming mosquitos require a perseverance not
often found in casual visitors. It is no surprise to me that the readers
of ``Consumer Reports'', rated Everglades National Park 34th out of 35
in its June '97 issue.
Images taken from orbiting satellites have enabled us to see the vast
shallow river's structure more clearly. One can see Lake
Okeechobee (Native American for "big water") at the headwaters, and
Florida Bay at the mouth with the island hammocks clearly aligned with
the flow in these images from space.
The Everglades is an excellent example of how knowledge and experience
(education) can change and enhance ones perception of beauty.
Florida International University Environmental Engineering maintains
an excellent
Everglades Interactive Learning site. Check it out if you want to
know and see more. There is a nice photo tour and more.
The Everglades National Park celebrated it's 50th anniversary on the 6th
of Dec 1997.
Food unique to the South Florida Area? Check out
this search on AllTheWeb! (quite a few links seem out of date, but
you'll get the picture anyway...) Check out
this one in particular,
but there are many others.
To get an idea about the various Parks and Historic sites in Florida from some "Virtual
Tours", check out this web site from the Unversity of South Florida:
Exploring Florida Virtual Reality
( Apple's Quicktime player is needed... and they do not support Linux)
Miami is in the United States of America. There are many ways that The
United States leads the world, and many for which Americans should be
proud, but one leading statistic for which Americans should be ashamed
is that the United States is the industrialized country with the
highest per capita rate of death due to gunfire.
If you think this is purely by chance you may want to
consider checking out a few of these Web
resources.
Elsewhere
I believe nurture and nature are both influential in shaping personality.
A few (not complete) significant environments are:
I love The Netherlands and the Dutch way of life,
so I was recently amused to be told that I can trace
my academic lineage
back to Dutch "ancestors". I've also had the good fortune to work
at The Sterrekundig
with some of the
greatest people I've had the good fortune to meet.
HydraDirect
in Hydra, Greece.
In particular, this book,
"Rhubarbs From a Rock" by
David Fagan
gives an entertaining insight into this fantastic island,
its citizens and semi-citizens.
Byblos, Lebanon
The Jerusalem Mosaic. If you could
only study one place to study the history of the western world (and the
essential elements of humans and religion), this
city would be it for me. Inspirational and sickening at the same time.
Fort Jefferson - Dry Tortugas National Park. Coral reefs, the
largest all-masonary fortification in the western world, "your name is
Mudd", and other connections.
Pigeon Key, Florida . "It's only a short walk"
Photo by D. Rice and R. Thacker
Who
A few of my friends are webbed:
-
Helen's home page
contains astronomy as well as motivational and inspirational pictures.
Alain's page gives
a glimpse at a more personal format.
- For an almost entirely personal web page here is
our good freind Marion
producing some great personal impressions on the WWW.
- To update your memory of rapidly
changing people.
- Jim and Sharon at wogglebug.com.
Among other claims to fame, Jim and Sharon are the designers and
creators of the fabulous Tortilla Press, Mark I and II. The Mark II has,
after a long and faithfull service, been replaced
by the Mark III which is essentially a solid maple implementation of the Mark
II. Also, do you know what a MUD is?
VRML?
(And can you pronounce it?) Check out
the company where Jim works,
Chaco, to get a glimpse at an
interesting vision for the internet and the technology and people behind it.
Also check out the webhood while you're there.
- And now for something completely different:
A Smokin' Web Site. As a
disclaimer, I do not recommend smoking cigars. They are
almost certainly bad for you and at the very least, not pleasant for
those who like to
breath clean air. However this site is generated by a friend of mine.
He is talented, creative, and has a great sense of humor. Here is a look
at some of his "art" and technology. Talk about burning desire.
It's classic Jonathan, master Webmaster extraodinare. Check it out.
Hanz and Franz say
"No girly man here.... A most pumped up site."
Why not
Interesting quotations, sayings, and aphorisms.
"A smart person learns from their own mistakes, an intelligent person
also learns from other people's mistakes."
- You are what you eat.
- Cogito Ergo Sum.
- Therefore, without food you cannot
think.
"Blessed are they that can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease
to be amused."
A few
"comic strips" I enjoy.
Top 10 reasons why I ...
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks
without knowledge, of things without parallel.
I'm a scientist. I recommend skeptical and critical thinking to
anyone. Check out the article "Science versus Antiscience" in the
January 1997 issue of
Scientific American as well
as the Talk.Origins
Archive.
More links in this vein:
I've found a number of sites that I think my more
technically minded friends will find
interesting/educational/entertaining.
Quickmarks is a frame-set of links to
useful weather, search engine, portals, news, and shopping web sites.
"I may make you feel but I can't make you think" -- Ian Anderson,
Jethro Tull,
Album - Thick as a Brick, Thick as a Brick.
Besides being a scientist and appreciating cold hard evidence and
logic, I also appreciate the arts (music, visual arts and
literature). There is a deep connection between our
knowledge/understanding and our perception of beauty. I am constantly
surprised by the power that music has over my emotions. It's almost as
if music has a direct route to my spirit. The list of music I like is
too large for me to spend my time inscribing it, but much of it is
rooted in Rock/Pop. Trip Hop is a category I've been enjoying
recently. A few recent (1998-2004) favorites are:
"India Arie", "Lauryn Hill", "Tracy Chapman",
"Sneaker Pimps", "Tricky", "Portishead"; "Filter", "Stabbing
Westward"; "Zebda - (Essence Ordinaire)", "Santana",
"The The",.... And with that, let me leave you with a some lyrics from
"The The"- "Dusk"- "Slow Emotion Replay":
The more I see
The less I know
About all the things I thought were wrong or right
and carved in stone
So, don't ask me about
War, Religion, or God
Love, Sex, or Death
Because....
Everybody knows what's going wrong with the world
But I don't even know what's going on in myself.
You've gotta work out your own salvation.
With no explanation to this Earth we fall
On hands and knees we crawl
And we look up to the stars
And we reach out and pray
To a deaf, dumb and blind God who never explains.
Every body knows what's going wrong with the world
But I don't even know what's going on in myself.
Lord, I've been here for so long
I can feel it coming down on me
I'm just a slow emotion replay of somebody I used to be.
|
And another line from one of my much older, almost forgotten, favorite groups:
"If the sea were not so salty I could sink instead of walk"
I have a collection of web pages that I've designed:
How
My favorite life insurance proposal software company is: ProMicro Inc. They
specialize in illustrations or proposals for Corporate Owned Life
Insurance (COLI). Besides the most comprehensive array of life
insurance product types, and the most extensive illustration, proposal
or report types to satisfy the most complex marketing concepts, they
offer the best service in the industry. Great service means that if
your brokers and/or staff are accostomed to setting up proposals in a
particular way, ProMicro Inc. will customize the user interface to
meet your needs. ProMicro Inc. proposal software, Overture, has been
designed to be customizable and to efficiently meet the individual
needs of each client.
Did you say you were curious about the meaning of Valkyr, Fricka, Wotan,
Freia, etc.? Check out:
De Walkure
When
This page last modified 25 Jun. '97.
For another spin on Space-Time, you may enjoy this metaphorically and
thematically sympathetic clock at
PlanetLive. We're talking
major gestalt here. (For Java enabled browsers.)
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