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Showing posts from October, 2013

Gone Fishing...

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Most of what we caught on our fishing trip were Vermilion Snapper  - legal this time of year in the Gulf.  We caught a lot of Red Snapper and Trigger Fish too but had to throw our catches back in the water.  Not a bad haul for late in the season.  You see our feet above with the tails of the larger fish we caught displayed proudly in the "official" trip shot.  My feet are on the extreme left. On Friday I went on an all-day fishing expedition in the Gulf of Mexico. This was supposed to be R&R for the six-man management team of the company I work for after a long day strategic planning session at a conference room in a large hotel on the gulf coast. We arrived last Wednesday evening and ate an enormous and tasty seafood dinner. Thursday we plowed through a long meeting on how we might be able to double the sales of the company in the next 3 years. After that brain-numbing exercise, we were treated by our president to a mindless, beer drinking day out on the beau

October 1813: Gaming the Battle of Nations

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The setup for the main battle scenario in the VASSAL module for Leipzig 20 .  Notice how the French (blue) are almost completely surrounded by the Coalition (green, white, black) on the map.  This is historically accurate.  More Coalition forces will enter the top of the map as the game continues placing heavy pressure on the French to try to hold the city of Leipzig while clearing a path of retreat off the bottom of the map.  The river system around the city abets the French defense but also restricts the ability of Napoleon's forces to maneuver. Napoleon Bonaparte is, of course, one of the great genius' of history. Not only was he a great military commander winning memorable battles such as Ulm , Austerlitz , Jena , and Wagram , but he also possessed an expansive mind in government and in economics . 200 years ago today Napoleon commanded his army in the largest battle in western history up until World War One.  Some 124,000 casualties were inflicted over four days

Watching Gravity

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Sandra Bullock holds on for dear life in a spectacular visual experience of watching the International Space Station be decimated by flying debris in space.  One of Gravity's "wow" moments. Note: Some minor spoiler's below but, believe me, knowing a little bit about what happens in this film does not diminish from its powerful visual experience. " Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is incontestable evidence for the worth if not outright necessity of the theatrical experience. It is a breathtaking visual spectacle, yet deeply rooted in viewer empathy and character, offering not just incredible sights and sounds but a story worth telling. It is stirring, terrifying, jaw-dropping, and finally genuinely moving. It offers the kind of theoretically game-changing theatrical experience that absolutely demands theatrical viewing on the biggest 3D IMAX screen you can find. It’s slightly too early to say whether or not Gravity is the best film of 2013. But I cannot imagin

Stumbling Into October: The All-too-likely Story of the 2013 Atlanta Braves

At the time of my most recent post on the Atlanta Braves , they were at the top of baseball. Best record. Chris Johnson was the leading NL batter. Best pitching. Solid defense. But only mediocre hitting. Well, in September their hitting went from bad to worse. Their pitching, including their great bullpen, became more inconsistent. All-in-all they were less than a .500 ball club, going 13-14 in the season’s final month; hardly the epitome of momentum. For that reason, they ended up losing the home field advantage in the play-offs by one game. So, instead of playing the wild-card Pittsburgh Pirates in the NLDS, the Braves took on the Los Angeles Dodgers, probably baseball’s best team in the second half of 2013. Which meant the Braves mediocre offense had to face probably the best pitcher in baseball right now, Clayton Kershaw .  Twice in four games, as it turned out. When you are down to one game being the difference between playing the wild-card team and the best team in the sec

Reading The Transhumanist Wager

Last month I finished reading The Transhumanist Wager by Zoltan Istvan . This is his first novel. Istvan attempts a great deal with his piece of fiction. He tries to capture the essential philosophic and cultural implications of the various aspects of the transhumanist movement , projecting slightly forward in time. He attempts to do so with dramatic flair. The novel contains a passionate love affair, a world war, and lots of heavy pontifications by the primary characters. In this regard it is not unlike what Fyodor Dostoyevsky does in The Brothers Karamazov and what Ayn Rand does in Atlas Shrugged . Both of these novels are great literature in their distinctive ways and I recommend them to any who might be looking for a long read that requires a bit of mental chewing to fully appreciate. Alas, The Transhumanist Wager fails to accomplish these heights. Though an intriguing read in portions and in underlying narrative, the novel is rather poorly written overall. It reads t

Salonen: Out of Nowhere

I owned and enjoyed Esa-Pekka Salonen's brilliant Violin Concerto (2009) before I purchased the app containing an exciting portion of it, The Orchestra . It was about my third listening to the piece after I acquired it earlier this year on a 2012 premiere CD that I decided it ranks with most other great compositions in this form throughout classical music history. It is an outstanding piece of music that is sophisticated and moving, vigorous and contemplative. This music validates contemporary classical music in a flagship manner. You have to go back decades to find anything of equal comparison. Such a rare greatness. The greatest concerto for violin ever composed was by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1806. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed several great ones with the Violin Concerto No. 3 (1775) being my favorite. Other brilliant concertos for violin include those by Felix Mendelssohn (1844), Johannes Brahms (1884), Jean Sebelius (1903), Alban Berg (1936), Bela Bartok