Halloween 2023

 Some pics from throughout the day

(still a mystery to me who gifted this hoodie to me!)

Astronomy

Advisory

Rideout-Squared

LIB and me

Stairwells and Philosophy

One of our destinations this past summer was the Ci'en Pagoda overlooking Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan.  The view was simply spectacular:

Our tour guide casually remarked that Buddhist temples are always an odd number of flights.  This one had nine stories.  It was, of course, an octagon as well.  I asked him why always an odd number and he said he wasn't sure (side note:  I really appreciated his honesty because I have had many tour guides over the years simply make up things on tours which is something I really can not stand). A bit of cursory research tells me that, in Buddhism, odd numbers represent becoming whereas even numbers represent completion.  Human, of course are in the state of becoming.  Nine is especially auspicious as it is the ultimate and final level of consciousness.  An octagonal shape, of course, reminds one of the Eight-Fold Path of Buddhism.

As we walked up for the view, I found the eightfold symmetry of staircase fascinating and took several pictures:

Taking these pictures reminded me of another vacation stairwell shot I took over 20 years earlier in Barcelona of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia.  The entire architecture being nature inspired, the design of the stairwell is snail shell inspired:

(not my pic, but similar to the one I took)

Although the odd number numerology is missing, the Sagrada Familia is famously always in the state of becoming and seems to never be complete.  

We humans are always battling two competing, useful, but ultimate incorrect viewpoints:  that nature is continuous and that nature comes in categories.  Snail Shells and Octagons of Nine Stories may not have the final answer but they can tease us into contemplating big thoughts if we let them...

So, as I contemplated these East-meets-West architecturally inspired thoughts, I turned to our tour guide and said, 

"Will we have to fight an enemy at each level in the Octagon?"

He smiled and said "I think you watch too many movies."  

Immigration, Extraction, and Exhumation

So in Irene's family lore, Taiwan is an important transition place.  An inflection between the past in China and the future in America.  Certainly a few relative were born in Taiwan, but for the most part most of the older folks were born in China and most of the younger folks were born in America.  So Taiwan is, like, 0.75 of a generation?  How do you quantify these things?  You don't I suppose, so I should stop trying.

Our trip this past summer may well be the last for many of us.  Irene and I have no plans to return (she has been many times, I have been twice).  Who knows what allure it will have for the kids when they are older?  As part of that decision, the older generation decided to bring the family patriarch's remains over to the United States (his wife is buried here in the Boston area).  As you will see below, his grave is a formal and ornate place in Taiwan and thus it was a big deal to exhume his remains for cremation.  The four of us were honored to represent the family so that my children's great-grandfather had a son, a granddaughter, and two great-grandchildren (plus this token white guy) all watching over the careful and respectful exhumation process shown below.

A few weeks later we had a half Christian half traditional ceremony for the interment of his ashes here in the Boston area with most of his children attending as well as half a dozen grandchildren and a handful of great-grandchildren.  The half-traditional/half Christian nature of the ceremony here nicely reflecting the half-in half-out nature of the entire of the lives of all our immigrant relatives.  Two powerful events that speak volumes about immigration and tradition and family.  

Reasons and Seasons

Ever since I took a class on religions of the West at Purdue, I have known this basic difference between the Western and Eastern religious traditions:  Western religion are outward looking whereas Eastern religions are inward looking.  Western religions emphasize rebirth and resurrection, Eastern ones an eternal cycle of reincarnation.

In my Astronomy class, I am always lecturing (in a good way; the academic style lecture rather than the moralizing one) my students about how all these things we take for granted about time actually evolved slowly from primitive ideas of astronomy: "Moonths", turning a 10 month calendar into 12, the usage of 12 and 60 for hours of daylight and minutes in an hour.  I tell them about how holidays that are not fixed in date on our modern solar calendar are holidays associated with lunar cultures etc.  How we carefully manipulate time to keep our solstices and equinoxes in the same place because the seasons are so important to us.  But I missed the very existence of seasons (or not) as playing a role in picking solar or lunar calendars in ancient times!

When I worked in the family winery 12 hours a day, every day for 8 weeks straight, I began to thing about everything in winery metaphors.  Children are like the grapes and adults are like the wine.  Education is like a destemmer and a crusher... well, you get the idea.  What's interesting is not the metaphors themselves but that my brain readily adapted its own private symbolism based on my everyday experiences.  Our metaphors don't spring out from nowhere!

What I recently learned (shout out to my man Joseph Campbell), is that the religions of the West all grew out of traditions established in regions of the world where the seasons play an important role.  The seasons roll right into their religions from their mythologies which are already steeped in seasonal symbology (including the springtime theme of rebirth and resurrection). Eastern religions, on the other hand, grew out of tropical zones (India for the most part) where seasons are muted.  Instead, stillness and eternalness are baked into their founding metaphors and myths.

AI art "Western myths meet Eastern myths"

Doppler Shifting Being Self-Critical

On our way to the library, Izze and I had a fire engine pass us with its siren on.  I noted how I never really just tried to understand the doppler shift before I learned about it in physics class.  I bemoaned the fact that I wasn't really intellectually curious enough, that I wasn't intellectually engaged in daily life as a matter of course.  No wonder I teach science rather than do science - I just don't have the right stuff!

Izze responded, "Well, that's a surprising thing to hear you say because you are one of the most intellectually engaged people I know."

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Years ago, we had an interim principal for a year (JR) and I remarked to him that, as a school, we seemed to always be beating ourselves up.  "We could this better" or "why do we do it that way" or "why can't we be more like that school over there that does it differently?"  He responded immediately with "that's what great organization do, they are always looking for improvement.  They aren't sitting around congratulating themselves - that's the way to slide backwards."  I thought that was a wise insight.*

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So, maybe it's a good thing that I am frequently disappointed in my own intellect.  Why didn't I see that coming?  Why didn't I take the time to figure that out?  How could I forget that? Hopefully some progress was made through the years. 

Thanks, Izze.

AI art from the prompt "doppler shifted thinking"

*He also dropped wisdom on me in response to my saying that eighteen year old Ken would be disappointed in 45 year old Ken teaching high school: "What could you do that is more important than this?" 

Pluto, Rizz, and Categories

The other day, I was going through the whole demotion of Pluto to dwarf-planet status when I used the following phrase: "Pluto is basically a high rizz asteroid".  Then, me being me, I had to stand back and admire my own turn of phrase.  I forced a bemused smile out of a couple of students for my efforts and then I went back to the delicate disentanglement exercise the IAU had to do in order to demote Pluto.  "Clearing one's orbit" seems so arbitrary and unsatisfying doesn't it?

The thing is, we all like to put things into categories.  Binning our concepts neatly separates things in our mind.  However, nature doesn't really work that way.  We got pebbles, meteoroids, asteroids, rings, comets, moons, dwarf planets, planets small and rocky, planets big and gassy, and everything in between.  Sometimes a student will ask me "Where does the Earth's atmosphere end?" and I reply with "how close to zero without getting to zero ever do you want to get?".  

One of the many reasons I like to teach astronomy is I will spend class time talking about these larger-than-science issues.  To name something is not to know it.  To name something is to think you know it...

AI generated art from the prompt "pluto is a high rizz asteroid"

In case you didn't know, Pluto is just a member of the Kuiper Belt

The Universe is Kind to Kens

Look what the postman delivered to me (on my daughter's birthday no less; confusing but cool to get a gift on someone else's birthday!)

No note so not sure who to thank.  So, a public but anonymous thank you!

(The Ken-from-Barbie swag is accumulating!)