Tag: pic-and-a-word-challenge
Glory in Gold and Silver
October
Bright sun and cool air;
azure skies and pumpkin pies.
Leaves fall in glory.
Silver Savior
The crowning glory
of our civilization
is, of course, duct tape.
Glory ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #334
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Waiting in Early Autumn
Some leaves change color.
I wait for a pot of gold
to end a rainbow.
Waiting ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #330
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Mortality and Defiance

Emergent
from dancing atoms,
life is short.
I live life
with defiant joy,
all the way.
Defiance ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #328
An earlier version of this post responded to a challenge inspired by Basho’s last haiku, written when he knew he was dying. Contributors were asked to imagine Basho writing a haiku for his closest followers from his deathbed. While I admired the resulting excellent sad poems, I defied the expectation of sadness and imagined Basho rallying briefly to encourage his companions with a pair of short haiku in 3-5-3.
My response to the previous challenge bungled the initial line of Mortality #2. My first thought was that Basho might tell his followers to
Live your lives / with defiant joy, / …
Telling people like me how to live is a reliable way to elicit angry defiance, so I rejected my first thought, neglected to defy my own fondness for alliteration, and settled on
Let’s live life / with defiant joy, / …
despite some misgivings. Hmmm. Wish I had used
I lived life / with defiant joy, / …
as what Basho might say on his deathbed. Hmmm. I can use it now in the present tense because I am still fairly healthy for my age, in defiance of the odds against those who bungle things more consequential than a line of poetry. So I use it in the revised Mortality #2 here, with defiant joy.
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Rules Took a Round Trip
Sharing More than Light

Slow shutter needed.
Daffodil and tulip share
early morning light.
~ ~ ~ ~
There is enough for us all,
if we take less than we want.
Light ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #319
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Crocus & Pachysandra in 3-5-3

Golden glow
with purple and green.
Spring returns.
Golden ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #306
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Raise and Look

Glass mug of black tea.
Behold the liquid’s color:
radiant amber.
Amber~ Pic and a Word Challenge #299
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Innocence
Children need to learn
that paths are slick and rocky,
but some lead to light.
Image © Patrick Jennings
Rocky ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #292
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Ornithocardiac Irony
October Cloud

Sailing on fall wind,
a flock of droplets migrates.
Each is a small world.
Sailing ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #286
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Layer Upon Layer
Smooth outer layer.
We see rough inner layer
when the light changes.
~ ~ ~ ~
Layers nest like Russian dolls,
when science shows us atoms.
Layers ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #283
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Optimists, Some w/o Neurons
Henley’s Indomitable Trees
Beyond Measuring the Earth
People like Pythagoras and Euclid reimagined the pyramid builders’ rope as perfectly straight (not sagging a little), so thin that it had no thickness at all, and extending forever beyond the posts. Crazy. They called it a “line” and found that they could reason about such things, proving new statements by deductions from what they already knew.
Those ancient geometers discovered much that was true and good and beautiful in the imagined world of points and lines, and a few of them took the first tentative steps toward using their discoveries to help answer questions about the experienced world of posts and ropes and much else. Eratosthenes kept the promise made by “geo”+”metry” when he measured the circumference of planet Earth, even tho it was impractical to try to wrap a tape measure around it.
Modern STEM is rooted in ancient geometry (among other things), and a long hard slog has progressed from measuring the Earth to understanding it. Our understanding is not perfect and never will be, but maybe it is good enough to help us save the Earth. From us. I hope we can rise to that challenge, and that I have risen to this one:
Geometry ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #269
Image Sources
- The colorful frame around the image is upsized from my much smaller diagram for Bhaskara’s elegant proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem. The resulting fuzziness of the points and line segments is a reminder that we cannot experience the ideal perfection of geometric shapes. But we can refer to the shapes when we tell each other stories about what we experience! (Tho often hard to read w/o wrangling equations, scientific theories are among the best stories we can tell.) The colors of the line segments tie the image to the theorem’s bottom line w/o using letters that would clutter the diagram:
a² + b² = c²
- The Blue Marble image overlaid on the diagram was downloaded from NASA Visible Earth: The Blue Marble. Making NASA’s image cost a lot more than making mine. That’s OK. It was money well spent.
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Perpendicular: Upright or Uptight?
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Perpendicular ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #269
The ceiling should be perpendicular to the wall
(and the wall to the floor).
Even the klutz who built my house got it right.
The right angle for slicing a pizza depends on
how many slices are needed.
© sabelnik | 123RF Stock Photo
Willing to count a circle as a “line” perpendicular to any chosen straight line thru the center? (I am.) If so, then spatial coordinates should almost always (not just usually) be based on perpendicular lines. Want to navigate on a really big pizza? Use polar coordinates.