College Room-mates, Comedic genius, and Vegetables

Just the other day,  in the middle of going over a homework set on potential energy, AR says "Hey, what can you tell us about a guy named Craig Ball?"

Assuming he was checking out an old entry on this blog, I launched right into a couple of my favorite Craig Ball Stories.  After I'm done, I say "Well, you must've done a deep dive on my blog to come up with that name, I don't even remember blogging about him before."  AR responds "Not on your blog!  He made a comment on an old WSPN article about you."  Well, well, well - flattered that you googled me up on the internets, Craig!  Hope you are doing well and have learned to love vegetables and control the unlicensed use of the letter 's' when it come to your name!

Craig Ball was a physics major alongside of me at Purdue in the late 80's.  We were dorm-mates, room-mates, and apartment mates for three years.  One day we were trading stories about kids making fun of our our names in grade school and whatnot (John Zello was 'Zohn Jello' as I recall), and Craig complained about one of his high school math teachers always calling him "Craig Balls" or "Mr. Balls" and so on.  Craig tried to correct him, but for some reason, that particular teacher never changed his ways.  Then, one day late in the school year, Craig turned his work in and got up to sharpen his pencil.  Now, in this class, Craig sat in the back row and the teacher liked the work to be passed to the front to be collected.  When Craig got up, he noticed the kid seated right in front of him quietly, quickly, and discretely adding an 's' to the end of his name as he passed it forward.  All of us listening to that story were just awe-struck with that literal stroke of casual comedy.  We all took a silent moment of appreciation for that unsung comedic genius. 

Another interesting fun fact about Craig was that he (admirably in my estimation) decided to become a vegetarian for moral reasons after he got to college.  Thing is, he hated vegetables and, as a consequence, became super skinny and a bit sickly looking at times.  In a way that made me both admire him more and worry about him at the same time.  Also, he was a pacifist (more cool points!) and yet his favorite sport.... boxing (intriguing, right?)

Double the Hair

Yes, I did once have a full head of hair.  And, for a few years, a goatee  as well.  This, in case you don't recognize it, is the OG pic for this blog.  I think I'm around 27.  I'm on a beach in Corsica lying on a beach towel.  A family friend is walking by and calls my name.  I look up, slightly startled, and he snaps this picture leaning over me (I think photo creds belong to Michel Brunet but I could be wrong).  So the 'upside down' pic is the correct orientation.  

For fun, I rotated the pic to see if I look different.  I just see about four times as much hair as I have these days...

Kind of an optical illusion effect combined with a yin-yang composition with a bit of an absurdist Magritte feel ('Ceci n'est pas un Ken'), no?

Me and Sports

So, not too much into the sporting scene in case you didn't know.  Growing up, I did some things I would consider 'sporty' though.  They all involved water. I was a decent swimmer and would swim laps with family or friends (but not competitively).  I would windsurf, sail, and water ski.  I pretty much successfully avoided all competitive sports and even avoided playing team sports for 'fun'.

Then, I got to Purdue.  Turns out those Big Ten universities take their sports seriously.  Who knew?  Every fall they had a sports fair where people can go up to tables representing all the various intramural and competitive sports clubs offered.  I went up to two tables:  the sailing club and the rowing club ('crew' if you know what you are talking about).  The sailing club was like 'you're in - come on by anytime!'.  Feeling confident, I went up to the table for crew.  Expressing some interest to the students manning the table, some six-foot-four girl looked down on me and said "Well, have you ever done crew before?" Admitting that I hadn't she then asked "What you are?  Five Foot Ten or so?"  I was so naive I didn't even know what she was getting at.  I said "About" and then she kind of sighed and realized I didn't understand anything and said "Look, the truth is the only thing we could ever use you for would be to cox for us - the shortest male rower here is, like, 6-2, and, honestly, you'd have to lose even more weight to qualify to cox." (I was pretty skinny in those days).  I left the fair disoriented and confused.

Four years at Purdue and I never went to a single athletic event.  When I got to CMU, a friend (Stephane, the guy standing on the boat in the pic) asked if I wanted to learn how to row and join the rowing club at CMU.  I said "Yes!" with a vengeance.  CMU, the college where they had to hand out free floppy disks to encourage students to go to a football game.  My kinda school, right?

So, pictured here is the beginning of my auspicious 2 years of rowing in Pittsburgh (Pitt and CMU shared a boat house on an isle in the Allegheny River in those days).  From this initial session where us n00bs learned to row on the 'barge', I eventually got to compete in the Head of the Charles race.  (I never made the connection to Boston until years after I moved here and I was watching the annual race and I realized "Hey, I did this race once!").  In practice I was frequently the stroke for an 8 and remember the cox or coach calling out goals in terms of how many bridges we had to go.  On the day of the competition in the Head of the Charles, I was in the seven seat (I think).

And that, my friends, is the entire history of my competitive sporting history.

The Webb Telescope, Y2K, and Neuroscience

 I have been nervously following the deployment of the James Webb Telescope:

Almost immediately following its launch, it was beyond any servicing mission NASA could deploy.  Every time I find myself in awe of its intricate, engineering origami dance, I have to remind myself that this performance is no lucky break.  The telescope was originally scheduled to launch in 2007.  Although its delayed launch led to a fatalistic feeling of 'this thing will never happen',  the many, many delays have, no doubt, contributing to its (thus far) flawless performance.

Before my students and my own children were born, it was popular to deride the overblown fears of the 'Y2K' problem.

After much fretting and overblown apocalyptic fears of societal collapse based on the real problem of computer code in 1900's only storing the year as its last two digits (thus forcing division by zero and negative time operations once the year became '00'), it was popular to completely dismiss the 'Y2K' problem as a joke.  (Kids, imagine a time when memory was so expensive they shaved off the first two digits of the year in order to save money!)

Here's the thing:  Y2K was a real problem for particular operations in the banking and other computer-based industries that use the year in their calculations.  Those in the know quietly fixed the mission critical lines of code and hardware while the rest of the world went crazy and stockpiled cans of beans and worried if their toaster was Y2K compliant.  The reason we could all laugh at it is precisely because the problem was fixed (although it was comically overblown by the non-technologically savvy).

Both of these seem related to the well known phenomenon of negative cognitive bias:  We tend to remember and dwell on our personal failures and discount our successes.  

As I get older, I find I am getting a bit better at acknowledging this.  Yes, there was no Y2K disaster and, yes, the James Webb Telescope is performing marvelously and, yes, I have done some good things in my life.  

I could dwell on never getting my PhD, never doing any ground-breaking research, never writing that science fiction novel, trying and discarding different careers until I found satisfaction as a teacher at 32, etc.  But, instead, I am taking a moment to think on my lovely wife, my two wonderful children, and twenty years of sharing my passion for physics with students.  Sure, my mind drifts to the failures of yore but I can acknowledge all the successes that led me here too, can't I?

I plan to take some time in '22' to explore some wonderful, mind-expanding pictures taken from beyond the orbit of the Moon with my students and my family.  The path here was filled with failures and successes.  I will try to think and appreciate them both in equal measure.  

"If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress" - Carl Sagan

Nice Try, Costco

 Whatever is one to do when Costco teases you with such a cruel choice?

[Last October] I was looking for their famed beer Advent calendar (24 German beers counting down to the Winter Solstice, err, Christmas) and I saw another box of the same idea... but for wine.  I stood frozen in indecision for an entire 4.5 seconds when I resolved my dilemma as handily as Alexander famously resolved his Gordian knot:  I bought both of course!

48 day countdown here I come:

Nice try, Costco, but I see your Advent challenge and I raise you 24...

With great focus and diligence, I worked my way through at a steady pace starting on Daylight Saving Time Ending (Nov 7).  However, I do confess that now, in January, I have yet to finish the entire work.  I have failed.  Nonetheless, I am putting aside my task to do my annual 'dry' check-in with myself.  So a careful scan of the cornucopia below will reveal a few bottles left to reveal their charms to me...