Where the name comes from

For as long as I can remember, I've loved scratch paper. Not as an end to itself but rather as a mediary or way station on the path to clarity. In working through upper level calculus problems, I would go through reams of scratch paper (which I would procure from the recycle bins of Kinko's) -- trying the problem, retrying it, then finally writing up the correct approach again once I'd arrived at it. This is the way I learned. And it remains so. There is something -- for me -- in the rephrasing of information (putting it in my own words) that comprises the essence of knowledge acquisition. And so that is why I am here, and I invite you along as a spectator, even participant. So much of "the stuff I'm trying to figure out" is represented on the web in various places that it seems wholly natural to locate my digestion of it here as well. Said another way, it made no sense to me to write a non-networked document which pointed to lots of URLs (references).