15 Minutes of Santos

Following up on the earlier Santos FTF post, here's a good video someguy edited out of his 5-ish hours.

That went by way faster than it did IRL!  BTW, the ambiguous arrow shows up at the 12:16 mark, 46 miles into the ride.  The video guy took the double black diamond route, where I stopped and sorted out that the easy trail was to the left.  Eh, six'a one, half'a dozen th' other.  (Just don't get on the hiker trail off to the right.)

Anyway, good video, good memories, good reason to go again next year.

Wright's Lake Trail, Spring 2024 Version

Took a hike at the Wright's Lake Trail today.  I'm working on checking off all of the local trails for the year – High Bluff, Garden of Eden, Wright's, and St. George.  Just one left to take in before the hot weather hits.  It's been written up before, but here are some pics from today.  As always, click to embiggen.

Recent control burn.  Looks messy, but it is very necessary.  If it looks like something out of Area X, that's because, well, it is.

Zooming in on a couple of the palmetto heads, you can see the green sprouting back out.  Beautiful, healthy, and a natural part of these woods.

One of the big slumps, aka nascent sinkholes.  Nicely burned, to the waterline.

Easy to see the path today.

Walking this bridge is a true leap of faith.  Here it is in dryer times.  About a foot deep over the top of the bridge at present.  The blue thing on the right is a trail marker blaze.

Little to no cell coverage of the area, so I simply put my phone on airplane mode.  Not out of touch though, I brought along my FT-70.  Talked to an acquaintance over in Live Oak just to make sure it was working well enough, and it was.

So overall another good day in the woods!  Shoes are in front of fan drying right now.

On This Fine Equinox

It seemed like time to go back to the Garden of Eden.  Well, at least the alleged one, the same one previously blogged about.  Nice day, peaking in the low 60's.  Probably not many of those left this spring, so we might as well make the best of them.  Lots of people out enjoying the trail, but it never seemed crowded.  The only picture I took (right, bright green in foreground) is of a small torreya tree, something unique to the area.  The trail is truly a small time capsule left over from the last ice age.  It's still Florida, but a very different Florida.

Cougar Attack in Washington State

Cougar attacks gravel biker, fought off for 45 minutes.  Caution, gross pictures.

Good thing they were in a group.  Definitely something to keep in mind when venturing into the wilds.

You're Probably Saying It Wrong

Irish names you're probably saying wrong and how to pronounce them at CNN.

Generally I'm a big fan of simplified phonetic spellings, and I find these entirely confusing.  There are historic reasons though, and these are not easily fought.  From the article:

Another reason is that "there were different stages of spelling normalization in the Irish language.  In the 1950s, they decided to modernize the alphabet."  That's when a lot of simplified, anglicized spellings took off. 

Finally, Ireland is an English-speaking country where only a small minority claims to speak its native language "very well."  So, says O Seghdha, "Another part of it is, yeah, people just having a go."

Eh, I'm not about to go around telling people how to spell their names, especially not today.  As long as they take with my befuddlement and occasional mispronunciations in stride, I'll accept their corrections gracefully, and we're all OK.

On this Pi Day...

Atlas Obscura has a few mathematically-minded things to say, probing the mysteries of:

• Why do we always seem to be solving for x?
• Oldest example of the symbol for zero.  I'm sorry, but it's still a big nothing.
• One scary-ass prime number.
• A mathematician proposes improved phonetics for numbers over radio.

I like that last one, though the article is from 2016 and this system has never caught on.  Here's a direct link to the mathematician in question's web site that gives all they why behind it, and here's the chart:

I kind of like these.  Better than saying "tree" or "fife" and sounding like a dork, and especially better than that jacked-up ITU system.  Wonder if it'll ever catch on?  It should.

ps: If you need more math humor, check out last weekend's Foxtrot.

Still Crimped

Legs are still feeling a little crimped after Saturday's 50 miler, so let's go over crimping wires today.

Huh.  You can learn something every day.  Wish I'd known this decades ago.