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?