Archive for December, 2020

Holiday Stereogram

For our Christmas card this year, I was playing around with some ideas. I thought I’d make a stereogram out of the typical coronavirus image, since that’s what 2020 was about, and I was going to have the hidden text that appears when your eyes are correctly aligned. I was partially successful in that endeavor – the online stereogram generator did generate a stereogram with my text, but it didn’t look good and my son reminded me I already did a magic eye thingy before so I moved on from that.

But in my iterations of stereograms, I made this one that does not have any text – just blobs of virus that get a depth effect when you cross your eyes just right.

stereogram of covid-19 depiction

For those of you who did not get a Christmas card from me, consider this as your holiday greetings.

And the Lord will remove from you all sickness; and He will not inflict upon you any of the harmful diseases of Egypt which you have known, but He will give them to all who hate you.

Deuteronomy 7:15

All-Haiku Bowl Predictions, 2020 Part 2

Based on the popularity existence of last year’s article predicting bowl games in haiku form, I present to you this year’s all-haiku bowl game predictions. Still America’s only all-haiku college football bowl game predictions.

These are listed in order of date (earliest first). Some picks are whom I think will win, and some picks are whom I want to win. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide which is which.

Special note for this year of 2020: This is the updated post that contains all the bowl picks. I didn’t change the picks from earlier, even though those games have already been played. They’ll be counted in mid January with the rest of them, all at once.

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All-Haiku Bowl Predictions, 2020 Part 1

Based on the popularity existence of last year’s article predicting bowl games in haiku form, I present to you this year’s all-haiku bowl game predictions. Still America’s only all-haiku college football bowl game predictions.

These are listed in order of date (earliest first). Some picks are whom I think will win, and some picks are whom I want to win. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide which is which.

Special note for this year of 2020: I normally made predictions between the last game of the season and the first bowl game, as the selection committee has done its job and all bowl games have picked participants. However, this year the regular season is going later than usual due to late starts and postponements and such, so the first bowl game starts before many conferences have finished their seasons. I will provide the first round of picks this week, for the bowls that have finalized their teams. Then I’ll be providing the remaining picks next week, when everything else should be decided.

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PSALM 7

Now it is time for another PSALM.

Gamma made this one, like last time. This one was titled “Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions” by him.

Now only 143 more to go.

Now then, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer, then we will die!

Deuteronomy 5:25

On Sevenths

As we are homeschooling our 4th grader this year, and as we are starting the fractions section of math, I have been thinking of fractions. In particular, the sevenths.

All other fractions for single-digit denominators made sense to me, regarding converting them to decimals. But not seven.

The closest thing to not making sense other than seven is that 9/9 = 0.999999… and seems to me that 9/9 approaches 1 but never equals it. The difference is 0.0repeating1.

But on to sevenths. I have been telling my son that he needs to know his multiplication facts by heart, and I then thought it odd that I never tried to memorize what 1/7 is. So I set myself to doing it. I must have, long ago, decided it made no sense and was not worth doing, but doing it now it’s not so bad and I don’t know why I took so long to do so.

One seventh is 0.142857 with those 6 digits repeating forever.

For those starting to get bored, here’s where it starts to get interesting, at least for those of us who can find numbers interesting. And if numbers don’t interest you, maybe patterns will?

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