We heard when we moved here that the fireworks were just phenomenal. You might excuse us for thinking we had a view of the professional fireworks from our deck. We were completely wrong. We had a spectacular fireworks display that lasted for three hours. This little video does not really do it justice because there was much bigger stuff going off a lot of the time all over the whole valley below us. We were awestruck. It was not so much that the fireworks were amazing, even though they were. It was more that this thing went on at a frenetic pass for three hours. There must have been an explosion of some kind two or three times per second with periods of much more than that. The thing that was most mind-boggling is the level of participation amongst the whole community had to be huge because these things were going off everywhere, up and down the hills and valleys, in town close, far, on our side of the river there was even a very healthy level of participation. It was a joy to be here. Next year we have to share this with more people.
Kelly came home for the weekend to find out whether it is true we have the best seat in Centralia for the annual Fourth of July fireworks display. She and Lorena have been cooking and shopping up a storm. I actually have worked most of the time with a short hiatus for a visit from our friends Brent and Suzy along with their son Kevin.
In the meantime, Christian took a much needed break and is heading out this afternoon and evening to see what there is to see on Independence Day in one of those places where it all got started. Today, he had a hamburger at a restaurant owned by a semi-famous guy named Danny Wahlberg. He has not yet reported on that hamburger–probably still dazzled by the lobster roll he ate at the Park Street McDonald’s.
So, I will try to report here how it goes with that fireworks thing. It appears they shoot them off at the fairgrounds which does not seem like it would give us that much of a vantage point. We will see what we will see and if it is anywhere within viewing distance, we will put up an image.
Update (9:30 PM): The fireworks will start at the fairgrounds between Centralia and Chehalis after the Demolition Derby at 10:30 PM. Is that Americana or what? We are above the little valley where Chehalis is situated. It is truly amazing the number of fireworks being expended hear. It is like a war is going on that started up about an hour ago and has not let up even a little bit. Some of the explosions are quite a bit bigger than I ever remember anyplace else I have been and I bet we are hearing one go off two to three times per second during that time with spurts of quite a lot more. I am wondering how much activity they have down at the emergency room this time of year. I hope they are well staffed.
We are glad for every reminder that Christian is having the best of all possible cultural experience during his summer in Boston. For instance, he ate at the Park Street McDonald’s today after meeting. 
He said that it had been suggested to him that particular McDonald’s was quite possibly the very worst restaurant in all of Boston. When you are in a new place, you need to be sure to try to find the best example of the specialties associated with that place. What did he have? He is in Boston! He had a lobster roll which seems to pretty much disqualifying factor for being the worst of anything.
McDonald’s price: $9
Famous lobster roll: $20
McDonald’s taste: like McDonald’s (decent, worth it)
Famous lobster roll: really good
Michael Egnor recently authored a new article in First Things on the mind-brain problem titled A Map of the Soul. I am really just putting this up here as a placeholder and reference for use in future discussions. Egnor writes clearly and concisely about something he has studied up close as a brain surgeon. In addition, it is obvious that he has spent time trying to understand Philosophy and Philosophy of mind. He makes a compelling case for a dualist view. Here is an excerpt of some the observations that have informed his belief in the existence of the mind apart from the brain:
Wilder Penfield, an early-twentieth-century neurosurgeon who pioneered seizure surgery, noted that during brain stimulation on awake patients, he was never able to stimulate the mind itself—the sense of “I”—but only fragmented sensations and perceptions and movements and memories. Our core identity cannot be evoked or altered by physical stimulation of the brain.
Relatedly, Penfield observed that spontaneous electrical discharges in the brain cause involuntary sensations and movements and even emotions, but never abstract reasoning or calculation. There are no “calculus” seizures or “moral” seizures, in which patients involuntarily take second derivatives or ponder mercy.
Similar observations emerge from Roger Sperry’s famous studies of patients who had undergone surgery to disconnect the hemispheres of the brain. This was done to prevent seizures. The post-operative patients experienced peculiar perceptual and behavioral changes, but they retained unity of personal identity—a unified intellect and will. The changes Sperry discovered in his research (for which he won a Nobel Prize) were so subtle as to pass unnoticed in everyday life.
I have never really been to China yet. I have been in a lot of different parts of East Asia, but never in China proper. That includes Taiwan, Japan, Korea (South of course), Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. I was scheduled to fly to Shanghai and Shenzhen on July 3–imagine that, the Fourth of July in China, but could not manage to get the visa in the short amount of time available. I currently work on a team with distributed workers–two in China, one in Quebec, the boss in Vancouver, BC, and me. It works amazingly well. I am the only one on the team whose first language is English, but that is what we speak. I love this new job so far. There is lots of pressure, but also lots of interesting work. What more could you ask out of a job at my stage in life–interesting work is worth gold. I will be over there in the next few months, God willing. Looking forward to it.
Our dear friends Luis and Mine who are also Lorena’s brother Rigo’s father and mother-in-law each painted us a painting for our new house when we moved to North Carolina. It was so kind of them to paint these for us and we love them a lot. Now we have found a great home for both of them in our new house.
Mine’s painting is perfect for a kitchen setting. We found a tripod for it and keep it on the counter. The colors are just perfect, too.
Luis’ painting is amazing. It is a street scene that is very, very Mexican in style. One of the bathrooms in the house has a patently Mexican motif and the colors match remarkably well. We would have had a hard time finding a painting better than the one Luis painted for us.
We are grateful to them both.
This morning, the plumber and his son showed up at 8:00 AM on the dot to plumb all the faucets and the dishwasher. We were very pleased with the work. Right now it seems like the work is proceeding inch by inch. After the plumber left, the granite guy came back to drill another hole in the granite for the sprayer beside the vegetable sink faucet. He was an hour later than scheduled, but we enjoyed the visit very much. He did a great job. We spoke Spanish the whole time he was here (a Puerto Rican guy who married a Mexican girl from Michoacán).
Every time someone comes to fix something, one or two more things are uncovered. This time it was the attachment of the dishwasher (I will eventually put up a picture of that) to the granite. It requires another piece of metal no one had yet considered, but Mark P. promised he will install. In addition to that, we could install the vegetable sink sprayer, but we could not hook it up to water because the plumbing guys were already gone. Mark P. is going to deal with all of that after he gets back from vacation at Crescent Lake in Oregon after the Fourth of July. I will not get to see it until the week after that though because I am spending the fourth of July in China.
P.S. We have water to the faucets and drains in the sink so we actually have an operational kitchen. It will not be completely operational until we have our hood and the replacement for the second oven door, but we are getting very close now.
I woke up to this view of Mt. Rainier from my home office this morning. I would say I am sorry for putting up so many images, but I have not gotten tired of it yet and I am not yet sorry for putting up so many pictures of the mountain. In other good news, the plumber is scheduled to be here at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning so we should have water in our kitchen. We need to get one more hole drilled for the vegetable sink sprayer and that is not scheduled to happen until 3:00 PM. That means I get to play plumber for a little while to put the (already hooked to the water supply) sprayer. What could go wrong?
You might have noticed we put up a new blog header. Lorena found my old Canon PowerShot SD 750 pocket camera when she unpacked the house. I immediately went out and took this picture. I am not a great photographer and the camera, while it may not be the best in the world, is small enough to fit comfortable in a shirt pack, still takes good enough pictures that I cannot tell the difference.
This move has really been a joy. We are thankful for it all from our old friends in Texas (Dan, Al, Jill, Gary, Debbie, Sue, the Lee’s, the Drake’s, all of them) to our new friends, starting with Bob and Gena, there is much for which to be thankful. The least of these things for which to be thankful is the “stuff” we are unpacking and even that brings back memories–this is the camera Grandpa Lauro always used while he was with us.
For a non-eventful day, today has been pretty eventful. Yesterday, we realized that the ceiling in our house is really high. Mark and his wall and/or his ceiling texturing guy brought an eight foot ladder to texture the ceiling. It turns out he needed a ten foot ladder. It dawned on us that we would need a ten foot ladder to clean the windows, so we went down to our local Ace hardware store and bought ourselves a new ladder. The texturing is done now so the living room and the kitchen are now ready to paint.
In the mean time, we have now ordered our third vegetable sink faucet. The first one was too big, the second one was too long (we would have water on the floor–it is a little sink), and now we hope we have ordered one that is just right. It is the same brand as the main sink and the pot-filler sockets so it should match nicely. Also, it is what is called a “bar” faucet so the length of the spout is only eight and a half inches so it should center itself over the drain in the sink. In addition it has a sprayer. That will require another hole in the faucet, but it will be worth the wait. We ordered it from Amazon and paid for one day shipping so, hopefully, we will have water before the weekend.
The latest and most painful challenge so far for Lorena is to decide what color she wants to paint the walls. I am staying out of it. I am sure it will be fine whatever it is.
The shirt was my Father’s Day present (see below). And the pie to the life is strawberry-rhubarb (from the garden).
Christian is living a couple of blocks from the Boston Pops Orchestra. He says it is really hard to get good tickets to any of the interesting performances there. Still it is cool he lives so close. He says he walks by it all the time. He took this amazing picture yesterday.
Kelly came home for the weekend. She and Lorena have big plans that have to do with shopping. She saw some fashiony thing she just has to have at the Country Cousin restaurant so they are going to head out to find it. Fortunately, I have plenty of work to do on my sickle cell disease project so I cannot go.
The only down side to having Kelly here is that Kiwi has been acting out. We are not sure whether it is because she is so excited to see Kelly or because she sees Kelly diluting the attention she gets when no one is visiting. At any rate, Lorena had to put her in timeout. I have to say, it surely does not seem like that helped much.
Mark asked us to check the package for the main faucet to see if everything was there, so we pulled it out and put it into place. We like it a lot. the vegetable sink faucet is scheduled to arrive today. We are looking forward to seeing that, too. The water is not yet hooked up to anything. We are looking forward to that happening next week.
First, the important stuff: Kelly’s new glasses arrived and I think she looks just stunning with her new librarian hipster look.
On other fronts, there are lots of good things going on. She loves her work, her company, and her fellow employees. She made a great decision to stop for now at a Masters degree and get some experience. I am not sure how she could have found a better first job than the one she is in. Amazingly, she makes use intense of the things she learned during in her Bachelors degree and internship in Statistics to inform her work doing precisely what she learned studying Marketing Strategy during her Masters degree. Write now she is deep into planning and running focus groups. Before that she developed a huge (for her corner of the industry) marketing survey and then evaluated the results with statistical tools the company had never previously used. One recent new innovation she brought to the company was a better way to set pricing more informed by data and analytics than by expert opinion alone.
So, three quarters of a year in, she has started to think a little about what to do next. She will finish her first round trip of the Marketing process in the fall and really needs to get her second round trip in where she does it completely on her own, and then a third round trip to own the process. After that, she needs to decide what to do next. There is a great growth path for her right where she is, but there are other academic and work options.
Kelly’s values are not at all in alignment with the Seattle zeitgeist. There are some particular evils held in high regard that are difficult to abide and they permeate even parts of the society, particularly in places like Portland and Seattle, that historically have been less coarse and held good morals. I think that reality will play heavily in whatever direction she wants to head next.
Still, when you have new stylish glasses like these, life looks pretty good.
We have had a little bit of a struggle getting the faucets here to our remodel to be able to really start using the kitchen. We were really happy today the first set arrived today. It consists of the faucet and sprayer for the main kitchen. We ordered the pot-filler and the vegetable sink faucet, but they are not scheduled to get here for another week or so.
We had a struggle choosing the faucets. We found the main sink and pot-filler faucets that were just perfect, but we could not find a vegetable sink faucet, so we ordered the best the closets we could find. Today, though, Lorena found one that was much better so I ordered it on Amazon. We will have to send the previous one we ordered back, but in the end, we will have faucets that match.
Lorena’s father, Grandpa Lauro died just three years ago on June 10, 2017. We think of him often. Last Saturday, Lorena’s brother Tio Lauro went to the town and house where Grandma Conchita was born and raised to help some other members of the family clean it up because no one lives there anymore. They found a lot of great old photographs and this is one of them. The picture was taken on November 13, 1965, the day of Grandpa Lauro’s and Grandma Conchita’s wedding. The lady to the left of Grandma Conchita is her mother Leonor. She is signing as witness to the wedding. We just love this picture. We had never seen it before and wanted to save it for posterity.
An article about a book titled Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics starts out like this:
Five years ago, Gregory Chaitin, a co-founder of the fascinating and mind-bending field of algorithmic information theory, offered a challenge:
The honor of mathematics requires us to come up with a mathematical theory of evolution and either prove that Darwin was wrong or right!
In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, co-authored by William A. Dembski, Winston Ewert, and myself, we answer Chaitin’s challenge in the negative: There exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. Period. By “model,” we mean definitive simulations or foundational mathematics required of a hard science.
The article is very interesting in its own right, but I am also looking forward to reading the book. I am sure the whole book is worth a read, but my interest got piqued in particular by a some statements in the article about the measurement of meaning in information:
8. Information theory cannot measure meaning.
Poppycock.
…
The manner in which information theory can be used to measure meaning is addressed in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. We explain, for example, why a picture of Mount Rushmore containing images of four United States presidents has more meaning to you than a picture of Mount Fuji even though both pictures might require the same number of bits when stored on your hard drive. The degree of meaning can be measured using a metric called algorithmic specified complexity.
Rather than summarize algorithmic specified complexity derived and applied in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we refer instead to a quote from a paper from one of the world’s leading experts in algorithmic information theory, Paul Vitányi. The quote is from a paper he wrote over 15 years ago, titled “Meaningful Information.”22
One can divide…[KCS] information into two parts: the information accounting for the useful regularity [meaningful information] present in the object and the information accounting for the remaining accidental [meaningless] information.23
In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we use information theory to measure meaningful information and show there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.
Click on the images or the following links to the single day planning sheets at a larger size:
[Kelly’s 2010 planning sheet] [Christian’s 2007 planning sheet]
Lorena found most of our homeschool planning and other materials when she unpacked our stuff for the library last week. It was a lot of fun to look at them and remember a little bit about where we were and what we were doing at the time all this took place. I forgot how much effort went into to providing a precise enough plan that the kids would know exactly what was expected of them while I was away at work.
It also made me realized that the kids worked hard to get where they are. Although both kids were able to advance to the point where they did full time college level work by the time they finished eighth grade, they did it more through hard work and day to day advances in each of a plethora of areas than by any special intellectual prowess.
For example, at the time of Christian’s 2007 planning report, just after he turned 12 years old in the sixth grade, Christian was just one year ahead of what would have been the most advanced students when I was in the sixth grade back in 1966. He got there through a ton of hard work, inching through Singapore Math for the previous two and a half years. the same thing was true for Kelly in 2010. She already had about a year of college credit from CLEP tests by the time this planning report was written, all through a lot of painstaking daily work.
It did not seem so onerous at the time. This is just what we did. By keeping at it and doing all the work every day, we inched a little ahead every year to the point where I was able to write this series of post about the culmination of our homeschool efforts on skipping high school.
I thought I would try to catch up on the kitchen remodel posts today because I unexpectedly found some breathing room from my day job and side gig. The kitchen is really starting to look like it is going to look in the end with a couple major items some medium size items and a lot of small items. I thought it would be easiest to just show some pictures of where we are and explain what is left to do.
First, I promised a picture of the oven that got broken in or before shipping. We no longer have the shattered door, but we have a picture of the empty space where the door should be. It does not even look so bad that way, but it is worthless for anything other than shelf space the way it is now.
Here is all the stuff remaining that we know needs to be completed:
1. Faucets for the main and vegetable sinks and a pot-filler faucet for the stove
2. Exhaust hood for the stove top
3. Glass for the buffet/coffee service cabinets
4. All the drawer and cabinet door pulls
5. Adjustment of the cabinet doors so they are level and even with each other
6. Bottom oven door replacement
7. Paint for the kitchen
8. Moulding for the living room
9. Moulding for the cabinet tops
and finally…
10. Paint for the living room if we can afford it. Otherwise we wait or do it ourselves.
Update: Oops. Thought of a couple more:
11. Light brackets for the ceiling lights
12. Wall plastering
13. Under-cabinet LED lights
14. Electrical fixtures
15. Dishwasher
More pictures to give a sense for the state of the kitchen:
