A GENIUS IDEA

I had this idea a while back, but I didn't have the technical chops to pull it off. So,  I enlisted my daughter to bring it to fruition:

If you don't get, well, then you don't get it...

Cleaning Out your Subconscious

Step One:  Descend into your subconscious.  Examine what is down there.  Spend some time sorting, weighing, pondering.

Step Two:  Haul out the garbage.  Jettison the stuff weighing you down.

Step Three:  Set up some habits of mind that are positive and healthy for you as you step into the future:

Social Mores and Conservation Laws

You ever notice that it's hard to define exactly what social expectation are but you certainly notice right away if you deviate from those norms (try wearing your speedos to go to the grocery store)?  The more you deviate, the more you will be identified as being out-of-the-norm.  It's the differential that actual winds up defining what the norm is!

In physics, there are these very abstract, hard-to-define conserved quantities:

Momentum

Energy 

Angular Momentum

Charge

Here's the interesting parallel that I just realized today:  Although these conserved quantities are hard to describe and abstract, their rates of change are well understood and approachable:

Rate of change of momentum is ................ Force!

Rate of change of energy is ....................... Power!

Rate of change of angular momentum is... Torque!

Rate of change of charge is........................ Current!

I feel like there is a deep truth here.  Although the deep truths of life  are not readily apparent, one can infer the truth from the importance and weight of their deviations and their rates of change.  

No matter how deep the ocean, it's the waves that get ya!

Follow the clues, people, follow the clues.

Chaffee Elementary, White Middle, and Grissom High

I am from "Rocket City USA" aka Huntsville, Alabama.  We were proud of our NASA connections and all the work done there on rockets, astronaut training, and the Shuttle program.  Little did I know I would grow up to teach what was considered the very water we drank back then and there as a unit in astronomy.

Each year, around this time, I do a deep dive with my astronomy class into the 1960's race to the moon by watching several of these episodes:

    

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_Missions)

Every year, I tear up at times and am deeply moved by what the astronauts went through and what was being accomplished by our country that might have been, in retrospect, the greatest accomplish ever made by a single country.  The hardest hitting, of course is the Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom (likely to have been the first man on the Moon until then), Ed White (first American to do an EVA), and Roger Chaffee.  Although my pathway through the Huntsville Public Schools did not include these, I had friends that went to all of these schools:

Grissom High

White Middle School

Chaffee Elementary

12 year old Kenny: "Who were those guys?  They died in a training fire? Oh okay."

50 year old Mr. Rideout tearing up at the back of the classroom: "Oh, I feel like I knew those guys."

Funny, how time changes your perspective, isn't it?

My OG Physics Textbook

 Sure, I'm proud of the recent publication of my physics book for Barron's.  However, there was another.  Back in 2005 or so, my first crew of AP Physics students at Swampscott noted my complaints about the textbook we were using ("Mr. Rideout, you should write your own textbook!" "Maybe I will, maybe I will").  Well, at the end of the year, they bound all of my various handouts from throughout the year and presenting me with the OG Rideout physics textbook.  Apparently I was still doing my most excellent Commander Riker impression back in those days (Nowadays, my current students don't even know who that is so I haven't done my most excellent impression in quite some time).  

I believe this effort was about 97 % Erinn Phelan, but any of the other students listed in the masthead should feel free to set the record straight!  Reading some of those names this evening took me right back.  I hope they remember the fun times we had - I certainly do.

I casually flipped through the book, finding many handouts that I authored for the first time that year that are still in use in my contemporary classes.  At the very end, I found this transcription of an impromptu lecture that I gave when someone asked me to give them advice for life (I'm guess that was a M. Graul request?):

Wine Labels and Baptisms

 Today, I noticed an old souvenir of a wine bottle in the corner of my den.  It is one of the last remnants of my previous life as a wine importer.  The bottle is the one on the left (back label is below).  For two years I tried my hand at importing four varietals (Chardonnay, Merlot, Aleatico, and Syrah) from the family winery.  I haven't thought about that back label text that I wrote for my importation company "Blackfoot Wines" in at least a decade ...

The other memorial to those years is a cross stitch that Irene made for me years ago (also in the den!):

The bottle on the right is from my cousin's baby's baptism in Corsica a few years back (Yes, my uncle did a novelty bottling for his own grandson!).  Here's a pic from that 2018 day of me holding the star of the show (Saveriu): 

Bad News, Free Will, and Harold Kushner

In a world gone crazy, in every sense:  personal, professional, national, and global - it is hard to not feel the sting of unfairness in the air:  Why me?  Why now?  Why my loved ones?

A few years ago I read an excellent book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People"(Kushner) and my review ends with the punchline of the book for me: "live in the world as it is, not as we want it to be...".

My entire life I've pondered Free Will and have often wondered about the intersection of the determinacy of the laws of the universe and our desire to be the author of our own life story.  Usually I find comfort in the idea of free will around the edges of chaos theory or quantum mechanics.  When asked about the nature of time and free will, Einstein is said to have replied along the lines of "As long as you believe you have free will, that's good enough!"

Today, though, I am wondering, if we are just on a pre-determined rollercoaster ride and our free will is not really a thing but a useful fiction, maybe there is no need for deep regrets or to be mired in introspection or the 'woulda shoulda coulda' trap.  

Just live in the world as it is and enjoy the ride when its enjoyable and enjoy the fact that you get a ride at all when it's not...

from https://danielmiessler.com/blog/absolute_vs_practical_free_will/

Medicine, Cooking, and Magnetism

The view from the Costco parking lot the other day as I looked at the hospital across the street:

A picture of the bottom of our most oft-used pots in our kitchen:

If you had told me when I was a kid that there would be brand new technology to looking inside your body or that there would be a new way to cook food in my lifetime, I would have thought you were crazy.  

People have actually assumed that our pots are either new or we don't use them because they are so bright and shiny. Actually they have been in daily use since 2013 but they have only ever been used on our induction stove.

I believe that huge cylinder being placed into the hospital near my local Costco is an MRI machine. (now you know they don't assemble them on site, but ship them whole!)

Induction stoves work by flipping the natural magnetic moments in the metals of the pans themselves.  They stay nice and shiny because heat is not transferred into them, they generate the heat from within as those magnetic domains are flipped over and over by the coils in the stove.

MRI devices image the location of hydrogen atoms in your body by flipping the magnetic moment of the single protons in their nucleus using the coils in the machine. Your body is not exposed to any ionizing radiation or radioactive substances at all during the process.

Alls I'm saying is: Magnets are pretty cool.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

Another Origin Story

1970 picture from Florida where I was born.  I am seated on my father's father's lap.  My Dad is on the left and on the right is my grandmother's father.  He and I only overlapped for a short time and I never got to know him except through the family stories.

He was raised near Manchester, New Hampshire.  His father died when he was a toddler and he was obliged to quit school when he was 13 or so in order to work full time in the local mill.   He wanted to continue his education so he would go to the local library in his precious free time and taught himself as much as he could, eventually putting himself through business school. He learned to be a plumber and started a business with his best friend ("Eckhardt and Johnson, Heating and Plumbing").  His Swedish friend, Jimmy Johnson, had a beautiful sister who worked as a telephone operator.  They got married and had one child, my grandmother. As he earned money, he began to buy apartments and rent them out.  Little by little he lifted his small family out of poverty and into a comfortable middle class lifestyle.  My grandmother can remember fresh milk being delivered by a horse drawn carriage in an actual ice box.  When the Great Depression hit and his tenants couldn't make rent, he lost everything to the banks. He started back over from zero afterwards and built up new properties all over again until he could afford a second home in Florida and he and my great-grandmother would spend half the year in New Hampshire and half in Florida.

He was my Dad's favorite relative growing up.  He loved to go and spend time visiting his grandparents and to this day can recite limericks and funny aphorisms he learned from his grandfather.  My grandmother adored and worshiped her father for his humor and warmth.  If I had a penny for every time I heard her tell the tale of how he wouldn't just knock on a door but would rap out a melody with his knuckles, I'd be a rich man.  I regret never getting to know him, but, despite only having one child himself, now he has five great grandchildren and (as of this writing) four great-great grandchildren.

Final Days at Viscotek

    After living in Texas for a few years, I felt my time there was over and I gave my resignation letter to my boss at Viscotek in late spring/early summer of 1998.  I had been working on this big project for them though at the time and I promised to see it through to completion.  I was going to fly to France and make wine with my uncle again and then try my hand at importing the wine.  As soon as I came back from France, I was to pack up my few belongings in a small U-Haul and drive to Georgia to stay with my parents while I started up my importation business.  My brother flew down to help with the move and to drive my car for me while I drove the U-haul.  As I was making those travel plans, I heard about my High School’s 10-year reunion.  Normally not the type to go to a reunion, I decided it would be an easy and interesting stop since it was on the same weekend as my moving plans, so I made sure Phil and I would make a pit-stop in Huntsville on the way.  It was fitting in a way, because everyone was catching up: “Are you married?  Do you have kids?  What do you do for a living?” And I was like, nope – none of that – no wife, no kids, and no job.  They looked at me and were like “Weren’t you class valedictorian?” Heh heh – I kind of enjoyed their puzzlement because I was actually feeling pretty good about taking my life into my own hands and trying something new!

 

    However, what I wanted to share in this post was the last job I did for my employer before I went to France.  I had been working for months to get this robotic arm to automatically prepare these PET (A type of plastic) samples for the company’s viscometer and share out the results electronically such that hardly any human was needed.  The company didn’t really have anyone else qualified to do the install on short notice and I wanted to see it through to completion so we agreed that would be my last day of work.  The installation was for Wellman’s PET processing facility in Bay St Louis, Mississippi:

 

 

    I flew into the New Orleans airport and drove out to their facility on a Wednesday only to find that the new lab that was to house our automatic quality control system was still under construction.  There was no power even, but they had all seven crates of equipment neatly arranged around a lab bench.  I uncrated everything and did as much as I could to make sure everything was in good shape and ready to go.  I was thinking hard about the fact that I had a ticket to France out of Houston the following week and the installation takes 2 or 3 solid days of work.  I remember the feeling of my mind just going through all the possibilities and I turned to the plant manager who was being super-nice to me and showing me around and being apologetic about not having everything ready to go and I said:

 

“Listen, here’s the deal.  I’m pretty much the only one at my company that can easily get this thing up and running, but I’ll be honest with you, this is my last job for them and I’m flying to France next week.  So, I want to do this job and I know you want this job done.  Here’s my idea:  I’ll take my weekend early:  tomorrow and the next day.  You use that time to get power and running water to this part of the lab. If you do that, I will work night and day to get this thing working and train your guys before I go to France.”

 

    The plant manager looked me kind of dumbfounded and slightly in awe and said “Well, Ken, I guess that makes sense.”  I went to New Orleans for a couple of days and when I came back, they had everything ready to go for me.  The manager was so impressed with me, he invited me over to his house for dinner one night and introduced me to his daughter.  I finished the job and flew to France the following week and that was the end of my Viscotek adventures.

Flexing...

So my second year in Wayland, the seniors voted me 'funniest teacher'.  A couple of veterans teachers that were used to winning that superlative came over to give me props since they felt they kinda owned it and they were impressed a new guy scooped it up from them.

It is a relative unique tradition (I think) that Wayland will have teacher superlatives right alongside of the senior superlatives in their yearbook every year.  I admit to having gotten used to it.  This year, however, the seniors made me feel pretty special because I was flipping through the yearbook someone had left out in the science office and was reminded that they voted me in for four superlatives:

Thank you, class of 2020 !!

for new students...

Initially, new students sometimes think I'm just pretending to be a nerd. But the Rideout veterans know I walk the walk just like I talk the talk.

Proving the point: I don't often take selfies, but when putting on my timeline of Universe T shirt, well it makes me so happy, I just want to share the joy:

Family Photos

Lest there be any doubt who the family chronicler, photographer, documentor, etc

 is... Look at this sampling of photo albums that Irene has put together. (Also, guess who took the notes that enabled the previous post?)

It is an irony that many Moms everywhere can relate to that, guess what, who do you think is the least represented in the contents of these albums?

Today I want to acknowledge that the star of the show is not in the shot, but behind the camera!

Family Time

Wednesday was the 167th day since the pandemic got to our corner of the world and we were all sent home to finish last school year remotely.  Yesterday, the school year started for teachers (prepping for a remote start for this year).  Proud to say the four of us had an uninterrupted streak of family evening activities. We took turns choosing a game or a movie and all four of us came together (usually right after dinner) to do something together every single day:

We watched:

April and the Extraordinary World

Avatar

Avengers (2012)

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Baby Songs - ABC, 123, Colors & Shapes

Becoming

All 5 episodes of Asian Americans (PBS)

Bulletproof Monk

Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Captain America: The Winter Solder (2014)

All 6 episodes of Connected

Earth: Making of a Planet

Hamilton (Disney plus - two times!)

Hugo

In Search of Beethoven 

Julie & Julia

Just Mercy

Linsanity

3 episodes of Little House on the Prairie

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Newsies

6 episodes of Night on Earth

9 episodes of Our Planet

Penguins

Radioactive

Romeo and Juliet presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Stand and Deliver

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Star Trek: Generations (1994)

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

10 episodes of Star Trek: Picard

2 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Wars I

Star Wars II

Star Wars II

Star Wars IV

Star Wars V

Star Wars VI

The Giver

6 episodes of The Letter to the King

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

The Muppet Movie

The Peanut Butter Falcon

Thor (2011)

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Thor: The Dark World (2013)

We played: 

7 Wonders x12

Amobae wars

Blokus x9

Catan x2

Catan with Cities & Knights x 2

Star Trek Catan x 2

Chinese Checkers x 2

Codenames x2

Evolution x4

Forbidden Desert x3

Forbidden Island x3

Moonstar x3

Pandemic x7

Parcheesi

Peptide x2

Qwirkle x5

Risk

Subatomic

Ticket to Ride x8

Uno

Upwords x3

We did the following Zoom 'events':

-The Big Virtual Quiz Thing hosted by the Museum of Science

-Virtual Trivia Night hosted by Wayland Public Library

-Isabelle & Sebastien's Virtual Concert for the Extended Family

-Lucky 8 (8/8 at 8 PM) Virtual Kuo Family Reunion in Lieu of Crabbing Weekend

It's that time of year again...

 ...when you go "What?  Where did the summer go?"

It seemed I had infinite time to get all my projects done, but now that there is only a day or two left, I seem to have hardly made a dent in my list!

So this morning, I did get myself to strike one long-standing item off my list:  The mold on the north side of the house has been increasingly bothering me (and simply increasing) for years now.  If you look carefully, you can see the damage I did with a power washer a few years ago.  Turns out, there's no safe way to deal with our fragile cedar siding except a dilute bleach solution and elbow grease.  Here is a before and after picture from this morning:

Now, do I just push the rest of The List out into 2021??  Probably...

deCordova Sculpture Garden

Embarrassed to say I had never looked closely at the iconic twin hearts before. Complex our internal emotional landscape is, indeed.

As we walked up to another famous sculpture, I said "Calculus". Irene had to explain that nerdy observation to the kids. (Yes, I know this is the back of the sculpture...)

As I walked up to this one, I thought "hmmm... Every reclining woman on a divan could just be reduced to a pile of carbon..." Turns out, the artist did have a feminist theme:

Finally, I will close with a photo of my own artistic take on a non-art piece. I call it "Man's triumph over nature":

Oak Trees of the Mind

In the center of our backyard, there is a beautiful oak tree:

It must be over 75 feet tall and close to 200 years old.  It was here before the house, before the aqueduct, and long before me.  Although I know it is there and I love to look at it, it is always looming near the house whether I am consciously aware of it or not.  A strong, silent sentinel informing what the very concept of our home is.  This tree doesn't even know I'm here, looking up at it, admiring it.  This tree doesn't know its effect on me or on our home.

In my subconscious there are archetypes, primal feelings, memories, gestalts, mental schemas of all kinds.  I don't always focus on them nor am I even aware of all of them,  but they are always looming over my life - informing my very concept of who I am. 

Old cars, parking lots, and values

I told a story to the family today at dinner and none of them had heard it before.  That is so rare I decided to blog it.

 

 

 

So Meme and Grandpa have always lived below their means.  They just were never into material things.  When I was a teenager, Grandpa was still driving the same Volkswagen Beetle (“Bug”) that he had when they got married back in 1969.  That thing was so old, the hot Alabama sun had peeled the dark blue paint right off the top of the car.  Grandpa, being a physicist, decided to repaint his roof white so the Sun wouldn’t damage the paint.  So, he drove around in those days in this old, dark blue VW Bug with a big blotch of white paint right on the top.  It looked like a giant bird had just pooped on the car.

 

Now the other thing you must know about Grandpa to understand this story is that he hated to look for parking spaces.  He judged people if they spent time hunting for a ‘good’ spot.  If he calculated they spent more time hunting for a spot than it would take them to walk across the parking lot from an obviously empty section at the far end of the parking lot, he figured there was something mentally wrong with them.  He also taught me to take my foot off the gas as soon as you could see the next light was red.  Why waste gas if you were just going to come to a stop anyway?  But I digress.

 

So, in the early 80’s, Grandpa was working as an engineer at Brown Engineering. I think he was working on the optics for spy satellites as part of Reagan “Star Wars” program or something – it was classified.  He wasn’t happy with the program in general but he was well qualified for the specialist work the company needed.  Now, the only other folks at work that parked at the far side of the parking lot were those with super fancy cars.  They didn’t want to chance anyone opening a door into their car and putting a dent into it.  So, on the far side of the lot there were Lamborghini’s, new BMW’s, and Grandpa’s ancient VW Bug with a giant bird poop on the top.  

 

Although Grandpa never said it, I imagine the secretary in the front office kinda flirted with the handsome Allan Rideout.  What I do know is that he told me she would tease him about driving such a run-down car.  Rather than explain all his values and lack of need to participate in the conspicuous consumption culture, he would just joke around about needing a raise.

 

Now, this secretary probably had no idea of what Grandpa’s job entailed – he’s a very down-to-Earth guy and she probably had no clue how specialized his skill set was.  So she would tease him and they would joke around about his needing a raise.  She probably earned minimum wage herself.  Back in those days, folks got paid with a physical check every two weeks which you picked up on your way home at the front secretary’s desk. 

 

Since she felt they had a good relationship and they were always joking around about his needed a raise, one time she peeked at his check as she handed it to him (“let’s see if they finally got you that raise…”).  When she saw how much he was making, she was just struck speechless.  In her world it would make no sense for someone making that engineering money to drive around an old beat up car.  It just didn’t make any sense.  Nothing made sense to her anymore.  I imagine her mind imploding as Grandpa laughed while grabbing the check out of her hand and hiking all the way across the lot to his VW Bug amidst the BMW’s and Lamborghini’s…

 

 

Getting into Teaching

Recently, I was reminiscing with friends about how I got into teaching.  Although my mother is a career language teacher, it never occurred to me as a possible profession until I was 31 or so.

In the waning days of my stint as a wine importer in Georgia (2001-2002), I was having trouble making rent on the tiny warehouse for the wine I wasn't selling.  My mom was working for the Dekalb County School District at the time and told me that the district was so large, they had need of subs everyday, commitment-free.  Just get qualified and dial a 1-800 number the morning you wanted to go in and you'd make somewhere around $100 for the day.  Perfect for me - if I didn't have any sales calls or just needed the dough, I could call in the morning of and get a gig somewhere in the county.

To become qualified you had to submit some paperwork, undergo a background check and attend a couple of supervised visits to some area classrooms.  So I walked to the local elementary school and they sent me to a few different classrooms.  One very friendly kindergarten teacher asked me if I wanted to read to the kiddos.  I said sure and the excitement and friendliness of the kids as they circled around was overwhelming.  They asked me lots of questions and came right into my space and it was a moving, surprisingly personal experience.  The teacher said part of it was that there were so few male teachers at the elementary schools that we get to be rock stars to those kids.  

The next day I went to the local high school and they sent me to all their upper level classes to show off to an outsider.  I was sitting in the back of an AP Chem class and really digging the vibe when, at one point, a smart kid asked a tough question about batteries and the teachers totally messed it up.  I was shocked sitting in the back of the room and considered saying something, but wisely kept my mouth shut.

Over the course of subbing for the next few months off and on, I eliminated all middle school jobs after a couple of traumatic experiences.  Then, one day, I was just place-holding at an area high school for a sick chemistry teacher who had left some worksheets for her classes.  Usually, the kids knew these sub assignments were jokes and didn't work too hard on them.  But when her AP Chem class came in, those kids actually worked hard on their assignment.  I was endeared by them and started working on the sheet too, just for fun.  (my own high school AP Chem class was, I always tell my students, my gateway drug to Physics)

There was clearly this one kid that all the others thought was the smartest and they kept coming to him to get help and he gladly helped them out and explained things pretty well.  He was seated near me so I could follow what we was doing pretty closely.  At one point he had to admit he didn't know how to do number six ("Sorry, I didn't understand that one when she was explaining it either.")  I saw an opportunity and I discretely went up to him and said that maybe I could help him out and I talked him through how I thought about those type of problems.  The look he gave me!  He was so surprised that a sub could do these problems and then he said "You just explained that better than my regular teacher! How'd you do that?" and he happily worked out the problem and began to explain it to the other kids. 

Now, I'm 31 at the time and have had many different types of jobs by then and was well positioned to realize that the kind of personal validation I had just received is not something you get very often at work.  I remembered how much I enjoyed being a Teaching Assistant in grad school and how much I enjoyed being in school myself and the classroom environment in general.  Since I knew I was moving to the Boston area to join Irene up in MA, that spring I registered on some kind of online platform for MA teacher jobs and sent my resume to a couple of metro west high schools.  I only got one call and it was from the retiring department head (who was a physics teacher) in Swampscott, MA.  He basically asked me if I was for real, applying for a teaching job from GA with no experience except for importing wine.  So I told him I was moving to the area to get married and, yessir, was serious about trying my hand at teaching.  He was intrigued and said "Well, I don't know if I'd give you the job, but I sure like to meet you."  So I interviewed with him the next time I was up visiting Irene.  I charmed him and his principal so hard, they offered me the job! Although I assumed there simply must not have been another qualified candidate, much later I was told that I actually did beat out a highly qualified candidate. 

The rest, as they say, is history.

Some Easy Reading

Hey - What are these cool kids reading?  Looks so interesting, right?

Well well well - my new book for Barron's finally came out!  Unlike my previous work for them, this is not a test prep book so I had a lot more freedom to cast physics in my own way.  Although I decided my trademark sarcastic style would not play well in this series, I did manage to frame a lot of ideas in my own idiosyncratic way (Forces before kinematics, unifying the conservation laws under Noether's Theorem, mashing together all the waves (mechanical, sound, and light) to emphasize their similarities rather than their differences, etc.).

https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Easy-Way-Barrons/dp/1438012632

Orthodontic Tale of Woe and Misery

Today, Sebastien got his braces on.  On the way there, I regaled him with tales of my own painful memories of getting braces in the 1980's.  After I told him this story, he was laughing pretty hard and so I asked him "Should I blog this?" 

He said to but not to write it out but to record my oral telling of it, so here ya go (about 3.5 mins):

(((being meta)))

While I initially admire people that project certainty and confidence, the truth is there is probably something wrong with them (I mean those folks probably don't even use parenthesis (and I love parenthetical expressions (every thought leads to other thoughts which branch out and cause you to think of more caveats and what if's (I guess I'm very meta (what does that say about me? (I think I'm being meta about being meta right now (warning: recursion loop!))))))).

Rothko, Kagge, and Silence

For a couple of years, I had the good fortune to live within one block of the Menil Museum in Houston.  Adjacent the Museum itself is the Rothko Chapel:

If you are ever in Houston, I insist you walk inside and spend at least five minutes in silence.  I have done it many times and the effect it can have on you can not be over-stated.

Today I read the following passage in "Silence In the Age of Noise" by Erling Kagge:

" 'Silence is so accurate' said Rothko, when he refused to explain his images. Had he been able to simply reply with words, then perhaps he would have written an article instead of making painting.

I am not sure why, but the fact is that a hush descends whenever you examine great art, trying to understand what the artist wanted to convey...

A good work of art is like a thinking machine that reflects the artist's ideas, hopes, moods, failures and intuitions. Maybe I stay silent in front of art because I feel that I am separated from something every single day. There's so much I don't understand, that I can't move beyond, and art reminds me of that..."

I didn't realize it at the time, but Rothko and the silence helped me make several life-altering decisions back in those in-between years. 

 Even now, I can close my eyes and feel the hum of power in that silent space.  

Putting Things into Perspective

We all have a tendency to make a big deal out of things in our personal lives. These days, it doesn't take much to have a negative perspective on things. The seemingly well structured, predictable order in our lives has been revealed to be a thin veneer placed over an intractable mess. The thing is, knowing the truth is humbling and sobering but our experience in the world does not have to dwell on the negatives.

Teaching astronomy is a humbling enterprise both professionally (because I have so much to learn and the content is literally expanding all the time (see what I did there?)) as well as personally (nothing like thinking about astronomy to make you feel small, brief, and inconsequential).

Recently I came across an interesting compilation of 10 years worth of data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. This satellite has been quietly taking near continuous pictures of the Sun for years.  That foundational, stable element if our lives ("As sure as the Sun rises") is, in truth, a messy cauldron of plasma being stirred about by rotation and convection, whipping its intense magnetic fields into crazy chaotic contortions:

https://youtu.be/l3QQQu7QLoM

In those images, a massive ejection of plasma (a CME: coronal mass ejection) was captured back in 2014:

This is an actual picture taken in ultraviolet (the Sun that it, obviously the Earth was added to the picture to give the viewer some sense of scale).

Luckily we live 93 million miles away and the ejection happened to be directed elsewhere (outer space is mostly empty space after all). If it had hit us, we probably would have lost satellite communication and our electrical grid for weeks... If our planet were closer (like in the picture), all life would have been extinguished.

The Sun and indeed our lives are and always have been only stable and reliable in an illusory way. When we are reminded of the underlying capricious truth, it doesn't necessitate despair.  I look toward the Sun now with thankfulness and respect. I do continue to expect it to rise predictably tomorrow but acknowledge that it may not. I see our home star with more nuance. Sure there is some additional uncertainty within me but there is empowerment as well from acknowledging the scary truth.

These days I sometimes try to look at my personal problems from 93 million miles away.  The messy cauldron of my internal emotions don't really seem as overwhelming from that perspective. 

Deodorant and Priveledge

When I was in high school, a friend asked me why I never wore any cologne. I responded with indignation that I didn't even use scented deodorant, I was so against the idea of artificial scents. The reply echoes through the years as one of those moments where you can actual feel your perspective changing. Like getting to a plateau on a hike and seeing over the tops of the trees for the first time.  "Whaddya mean your deoderant doesn't have a scent? You wear Mennen. Why would you say it doesn't have a scent?"

I realized in that moment that because it was called 'regular' and because my own father had used it around me my whole life and because it felt familiar and safe, that did not mean 'odorless'.

It would take another 30 years but now I realize that not only was I walking around with an 'artificial scent' that was invisible to me; I was also walking around with a racial, gender, and orientation 'scent' that I was so comfortable with (and that society effectively bathed me with), I just thought I was 'odorless'.

Yoga in a Pandemic

When I was a teenager, I saw the movie Midnight Express.  There was a scene or two of the main character doing some yoga.  At the time, I didn't know what I was watching, I just knew it had some kind of aesthetic appeal.

Years later (I was around 30), I took up Ashtanga yoga in Atlanta.  I would go in three or four times a week and sweat an ocean onto my mat and, for an hour, all my troubles would disappear.  

After I moved to Boston, I let it go and yoga really hasn't been part of my life for almost 20 years.  The pandemic has brought me the time as well as, perhaps, the need.  So, at fifty, I find myself sweating an ocean into my mat once again.  Back then my hair was darker, thicker, longer... but, in my mind, not too much else has changed.  My buddy NRD asked me to record a snipped (he recently turned 50 too!) to inspire him and so I went through a sun salutation and a couple standing poses for him:

A pandemic is better than Turkish prison for sure!

Apples, Corn, and Deer

I have always been fascinated by the fact that the French word for potato is "apple of the earth" (pomme de terre). As is often the case, these little word puzzles that tickle your brain for years turn out to be the tip of a linguistic iceberg.  

Apples of an orange tree

Originally, all fruits were 'apples'.  For example, what we now call an 'orange' was originally the apple of the orange tree!  Eventually, we just dropped all the extra words and just called the fruit of that tree by the name of the tree (etymologically, the orange tree came first then the fruit and then the color).  I don't want to upset the applecart since you are the apple of my eye but the French are not so strange for talking about an apple of the earth. Most ironic of all is the expression "apples and oranges" (meaning you are talking about two completely different things and they should be talked about separately). How do you like them apples?  

Maize or Corn

Let me take a second bite at that apple: It turns out that corn is the apple of the grain world.  While it is true that corn is technically a fruit, what I mean here is that, originally, corn was the generic term for grain. What we call 'corn' in America was originally Indian corn. Corn can be wheat, oats, rye, etc. depending on where you live.  That's why the French call it maïs; they are using the original word for Indian corn, maize. 

While researching for this post, I discovered that a deer used to refer to any four legged wild animal.  I always thought it interesting that a specific type of item could become the name of a category ("Pass me a Kleenex"), but never knew that the name of the category could become a specific item. Language and words are such slippery beasts, aren't they? Words are all contextual!

Hart or Deer

Oh dear, I guess the apple does sometimes fall far from the tree, linguistically speaking.  (Don't worry, I realize this post is kind of corny...)

Red Snapper

The simple pleasures in life...

Before

During

Final

Le mis-en-bouteille familiale

Irene just showed me this amazing video in her Facebook feed from the family winery in Corsica:

https://www.facebook.com/montstjean/videos/596732560977762/

In the background you can see my cousin and her father (Ton Ton!) working the bottling facility.  To see the two of them working together really brings me true joy.  Also, the bottling facility was added in the years after I worked in the winery so I've never seen it operational before.  

Binary Code

I used to think it so strange that the digital world is binary.  Everything computers do eventually gets boiled down to zeroes and ones; gates that are open or closed.  How can they do such complex tasks?

Then, I realized that DNA is binary*.  Sure there are four base pairs but there is only one entry per rung: either G-C or A-T.  All these people... all these life forms on this planet! How can there be such variety?

Then, I realized that charge, spin, quarks, and many other fundamental particles and their attributes are also binary (positive or negative; up or down; matter or antimatter; boson or fermion).  Either the excitation in the field exists (and you have a particle) or it doesn't.  

The Universe is binary*!

 

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*Maybe not binary exactly but certainly based off of limited number of discrete possibilities.