Uh-Oh, Twelve Orders of Magnitude Different = Magic

1. Omega being the last letter of the Greek alphabet, that one goes way back.  I can't even remembered when I first learned the expression "from alpha to omega..." meaning from beginning to end.

2. Omicron came to me much later.  Not having studied classical Greek, I encountered it in math and physics classes where they regularly run through the Greek letters for variables and constants.

3. Metric prefixes is something that was taught to me over and over and now, in the modern computer world, are unavoidable.  Who doesn't know a Mega of something is big (10^6 precisely) and a Micro of something is rather small (10^-6 precisely)?

1+2+3 = This morning, Irene was reading about the latest variants in the Corona virus and she exclaims "Did you ever realize it is O-Mega and O-Micron as in Big O and  Little O?"  Oh my, I did not.  So obvious though, once pointed out - how could one have missed it??

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzlK0OGpIRs)

Turns out it is more like long o sound and short o sound, capital and lower cases are something else in Greek (unless it's the omicron, where there appears to be zero difference):

𝛀𝛚 𝚶𝛐

The OG sci fi movie

Just finished the marathon that is watching the 1968 Kubrick classic "2001: A Space Odyssey" with both of my kids.  Their incredulity, bewilderment, and begrudging enjoyment mirrored my own.  The scenes were even longer, ponderous, and slower-paced than I remembered (and I remembered them as painfully slow). 

In a surreal realization, I suddenly recalled that I only ever watched the movie all the way through once before and that was in the famous Atlanta Fox Theater.  My Grandfather, Dad, Uncle, and I went and saw it together on the 15 year (?) anniversary of the movie (making me my son's age today).  Another timeless moment connecting the generation after me with the generations before.  I remember that an MC introduced the film.  He came onto the stage from a lift below the stage playing on an organ.  I recall asking my grandfather what it all meant after it was all over and he said "I think it was about God." I remember being old enough to not agree and also to know better than to say so.

During today's viewing, we noticed so much inspiration George Lucas got for his 1977 Star Wars: the long shots of long ships, the landing bays, the heavy breathing soundtrack, the primitive digital displays, along with so much more...  There's the original, hard-to-access work of art and then there's the universal work of entertainment.

International sauces

I was reading an article about the old Roman garum sauce and how it used to be wide-spread throughout the empire but is almost unknown today.  When they were describing it, I thought, wait a second... isn't that just fermented fish sauce which is ubiquitous in asian cooking? (it is)

Then I saw, casually hanging out on the side of that article that that most American of sauces, ketchup, has, as its ancestor, the same fish sauce!  That sweet tomato-based (as new world as it gets insofar as condiments get!) gets its name from a Hokkien Chinese word, kê-tsiap!  A quick internet search makes me feel like the last person on Earth to find this out.

Reminds my of how I was a teenager before I realized that the delicate french condiment mayonaisse that my grandmother would whip up from scratch just before the meal in France was supposed to be the same thing as what I knew as "mahnaze" in a jar from the store in Alabama.

Oh, now I'm thinking on one of my favorite scenes from the great Pulp Fiction:

I've got to try dipping my next batch of french fries in fish sauce, right?

Student Doodles

 I wish I had thought of this a long time ago!  Students will often doodle on the side or back of their quizzes/tests.  I will make a concerted effort to scan and upload some of them here going forward.  

2021

2018 (?)

Explaining how a rotating spaceship can simulate gravity (Nov 2021)

Mar 2022

Junior Semi

WHS courtyard transformed into dance floor and reception hall: