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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #158: On the Discretization of Continuous Features
07.25.12
One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations,
their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there.
It's a bike ride.
Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.
It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
We'll endeavor to return before the last red line trains (around midnight).
On the fourth year of this bike ride, you might expect:
- more inconvenient passageways
- more full moon picnics
- perhaps more "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- certainly more amateurish enthusiasm
- disorientation
- reorientation
- pool halls
- bowling alleys
- dance parties
- karaoke
- imaginary histories
- scavenging for fun and sustenance
- more geocaching
- more oblique strategies
- more Oulipian constraints
- traffic median tea parties
Furthermore:
- A medium pace (maybe not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- We're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light.
- Short-ish distance; flat-ish topography
- Victory donuts!
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This week:
On the Discretization of Continuous Features
Time, of course, is not discrete, but since we are determined to mark its passing, we must somehow divide it
up and number the pieces. The ways in which we have solved this problem are many and varied - by counting
revolutions, rotations and atomic vibrations; with drips of water and grains of sand; using electrical pulses and
ratcheting of gears; and also with cakes.
Birthday cakes, it's true, are not the most convenient means of marking the time. They are a solution that itself
becomes a new problem to be solved. For one thing, they must be cut up to be shared (and a birthday cake
that is not being shared is a sad cake indeed). But they are also not the easiest things to get around on a
bicycle, which is a task of great concern to us - in the general sense, certainly, but also in the specific case of
this week, in which we have a birthday to celebrate.
But of course, we are clever apes with opposable thumbs, and we are able to solve the problems that we
create for ourselves. How on earth will we ever manage this, you ask? Well, you'll just have to come out and
see.
Yes.There will be cake. There will also be a bike ride. And bowling (BRING A U-LOCK!)
Talk, talk, talk...
Check out our new web site!
(and join the mailing list!)
The hacienda must be built.
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