--- Some legal research ---

My other website is the Therian Timeline. Part of its purpose is to provide substantive information about the therian community to therians and others interested in them. It's not that difficult since there's a growing body of research about therianthropy. I just have to keep up.

A therian, for those unfamiliar with the situation, is a human that identifies as a nonhuman. They may live happy, productive lives, but they identify as a horse or a wolf or a tiger. But no one's life is perfect so anyone needs information eventually to get through some life crisis.

I've been writing a series of guides for professionals with therian clients and I have a general guide and guides for therapists and pastoral counselors. Then, I began looking for information for legal professionals, but that was a brick wall. There's just not any such information in the legal literature. A poster in the legal advise subreddit suggested that I talk to a law librarian, so I shouldered my backpack and headed for the Ralph Carr Supreme Court Building near the State Capitol.

It was shadow o'clock according to the sundial on the Newman Center for the Performing Arts, and the walk to University Station took me through the University of Denver Water Garden which was spectacular in the heat of summer.

                                                        [Newman Auditorium sundial]

                                                   [University of Denver Water Garden]

After a walk from California and 16th Street Station to Civic Center Park, the Ralph Carr Building was welcomed coolness.

                                                   [Ralph Carr Supreme Court Building]

As advertised, the law librarian was friendly and aimed to be useful. I sat for a few hours pouring through the books she dug out of the stacks. Sure enough, there was nothing about therianthropy, but I did find information that may be relevant so, although I can't write a guide for legal professionals, I can write an essay that might provide useful information for later court dramas.

After work, I enjoyed some walking and climbing in the Denver Central Public Library, next door to the Carr Building. Besides being a library, the fifth floor has a history museum, currently displaying exhibits about the history of railroads in the U.S. The seventh floor displays contemporary art works.

Not all law libraries are open to the public, for instance the University of Denver law library is dedicated to serving the legal community, including legal professionals and students of law. But institutions such as the Ralph Carr Supreme Court are public treasures. It's a mistake to see them as only the place that court cases are decided. Courts in the United States should be for the people and a visit to a court building can often be an educational, enjoyable experience. Try one near you.

--- Math in my world ---

I've avoided mathematics heavy curricula. One consequence of mathematics as a language is that my dyslexia interferes with mathematics also. I'm slow and make a lot of errors, but one of the advantages of math is that there are always checks. If you know how to check your work, there's never a reason to let an error in calculations get by you.

But I enjoy mathematics. I especially enjoy explaining mathematical concepts to others. I like opening up the mathematical machine and showing others how it works.

I took courses in college through integral calculus and I continue taking them via the Teaching Company, MIT OpenCourseWare, and other resources. One of my areas of specialization in graduate work was research methods (the other was vocational evaluation.)

I haven't done a lot of research, mostly helping others with their projects, but I have done a good bit of advisory work and think of myself as a pretty good statistician. I like teasing information out of real world data.

One of my long term projects is the software I offer in my website, the Therian Timeline. I'll be talking about that as time goes on. It's available in the Excursions section and there's a link in the Related Pages links to the right on this page.

Research is an issue in the therian community and I made these tools available as free downloads so amateur researchers could have easily accessible tools. I continue to build on them. For instance, DANSYS is a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet (Calc itself is a free download) that can already perform most of the commonly used statistical procedures, but the extended version, DANSYSX, can do far more. I'm currently working on a regression procedure that will build a best regression equation from a set of data, rejecting weak variables. That one will take a while for me to complete.

Some folks love numbers; some hate them. What about you?

--- This blog ---

2016

I am using Google's Blogger to create this blog. It's a first time thing for me. I have a website but I've never "blogged".

I compose using KeyNote NF 1.7.8, a tabbed notebook program for Windows created by Marek Jedlinski and developed further by Daniel Prado Velasco.

This is one of my favorite programs. It works pretty much like a digital notebook with tabbed pages, so I can use it to organize my thoughts and my composition. In addition, it has lots of commands that make it a fairly powerful word processor.

Files can easily be exported in a rich text format that transfers really well to websites.

KeyNote is available on SourceForge if you want a copy.

When composing on my smartphone, I generally use the notepad app that came with it.

Bear Creek Commentaries is a companion project to my website, The Therian Timeline, which has sections on scientific excursions and cooking; and a YouTube channel, Open the World, a series of science tutorials and demonstrations (I haven't posted this one yet and won't for some time, but I will before I approach physics on the trail since it will be a prelude to that section.) [2023  correction. Open The World never happened. I even had some videos ready but my computer crashed and ate them, so I gave it up.]

I will be telling stories. I enjoy hearing other people's stories and I enjoy telling them. I find that stories are a good way to teach. I like to "open up the hood" on the world and show people how things work inside. I like to play around with the engine and let people watch, or even help. Stories draw people in. People become part of stories when they listen. I have some very old stories, some told by friends like Wolf, Coyote, and Bear, and some related by people who know streams that have gone underground for centuries before reemerging to the surface of the earth, or stories told by rocks that still show the footprints of massive lizards (did I say, "lizards"? Perhaps I should have said "chickens".) Some of my stories are relatively new - stories about the Wild West or the struggles for equality in the South. And some of the stories are going on right now.

These are my adventures, stories, meditations, contemplations, and daydreams.

Let's take a walk.....