The New Yorker, Jane Siberry, and Symmetry

When I was a teenager, I made an impulse buy of a vinyl album ("No Borders Here") based on the cover and the fact that one of the tracks was titled "Symmetry (the way things have to be)".   Those were the days!  We would just flip through a bin of LP's, take a look and then, sometimes, make that purchase and have an epic discovery moment at home when you dropped that needle.  In this case, I was knocked out by every track on the album (as soon as I heard Jane Siberry put that pause between "When he kissed me over there he usually  kissed me over here.... too", I became a fan). and I went on, over the years, to purchase all of the albums pictured below:

My freshman college roommate was a random pairing with a Hoosier named John Zello,  Luckily, we got along and became good friends for our undergraduate years.  He was a graphic design major and watching him work on his projects and explain the why's and what's of what he was doing was a real eye opener to this physics major.  It really is true that a major part of your college education is the variety of people you meet!

Years later I was in New York City, reading through the latest issue of The New Yorker (thinking about how I remember my father reading issues when I was a kid in Huntsville).  In that issue, I was struck by an advertisement featuring an laughing woman.  It wasn't clear to me what the ad was for nor why she was laughing nor what she was doing... but there was something about it that just caught my eye and I can still remember it now, decades later.  I skimmed the "goings on about town" section, realizing that I actually lived in New York City so it could possibly be relevant for once.   I see "Jane Siberry performing at The Bottom Line" on the list.  It had today's date and the show started in one hour.  The Bottoms Line was only a few blocks over!  So I caught her in concert just like that.  Amazing!  (a quintessential New York City experience if ever there was one!)

A week later, I met up with John as I had found out he was working for advertising company uptown.  I met him in his office and, amidst all his work, I saw a sketch detailing how a woman should be laughing enigmatically.  I pointed to that and asked "Is that your work?" "Yes." "Wow, I just noticed that ad in the New Yorker the other day!"  Turns out he didn't know where the ads were run, he just designed them to be eye catching and intriguing.  Talented guy that John Zello.

One day in 1988 Zello was flipping through an M C Escher book in our dorm room and I looked over his shoulder and remarked on that picture "looks like Bonifacio in Corsica".  He looked at me incredulously and said "how did you know that?" and said "well, i've been there and it looks just like that"

I'm blogging this today because I picked up my daughter from her freshman dorm room yesterday to bring her home for the weekend.  On the car ride home, she pointed out a building that reminded her of the Flatiron building in New York City.  I responded "Your uncle Eugene once worked in that building and he invited me into his boss' office which had a window on that triangle edge.  Very cool."  (years later my buddy Eugene would introduce me to his cousin Irene!)

"This is what I'm thinking

The reason your eyes keep returning to the fire

Is because it divides your sight

Into left and right, and dark and light and dark

Like a fine dividing wire

...

Symmetry is the way things have to be

Symmetry is the way things have to be"

-Jane Siberry, 1983

Bye Bye Fossil Fuel!

 When we first moved into our house, I was a bit dismayed by the huge oil tank in our basement:

It always felt kind of vulgar when an oil tanker would stop in front of my house and chug 100's of gallons of oil into my basement just so we could burn it in our furnace to heat the house.

Here we were contributing to global warming and heating our house in the most primitive way possible.

Luckily, progressive politicians in Washington and Boston recently structured a series of incentives to enable homeowners like myself to convert to geothermal (namely a tax rebate, a zero percent loan, alternative energy credit you can sell, and an outright rebate) so we did it!***

As a physics guy, how could I not love the idea of exchanging heat via a compressor and giant underground coil with the Earth itself?  Steal heat from underground in the winter and then run it in reverse to dump heat underground in the summer.  How cool is that?*

First up:  A giant rig drills two bore holes 100's of feet deep in the front yard:

These two vertical bore holes are connected in parallel to two outlets in our basement.  All of the connections are buried four and a half feet underground.

Finally, the old furnace was hauled away and an advanced compressor/blower unit was installed to feed air warmed by the heat extracted from the fluid (extracted from the Earth) into our existing ductwork:

Since our electricity comes from our solar panels,** we are a now a net-zero house! 

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*pun intended but this pun only works in the summertime!

** we overproduce electricity in the summer by about the same amount we underproduce in the winter. 

*** our conversion should pay for itself in 10 years or less (without factoring in the fact that we will no longer be polluting!)

Oh Really?

Yesterday, DB calls me over to ask questions during lab.  As I'm leaning over him at the lab bench to look at his data, he is asking me his question over his shoulder.  As he is talking to me, he swirls his head in a weird way.  In retrospect he was trying to flip his hair at me.  I said "What are you doing?  Why are you moving your head like that?"

He says, "Well, I want to show off my hair to you since you don't have any."

"Well, looks like your grade in this class just took a hit!"

I don't see much of difference, do you?

A distant visitor

 

https://www.mychamplainvalley.com/news/local-news/timelapse-comet-a3-seen-over-our-regions-night-sky/

Over a thousand times farther out than Jupiter lies from Earth, there is a collection of tiny icy bodies (each just a few miles wide).  They are so far apart and so distant no one will ever take a picture of them as a collection (known as the Oort cloud).  Before the dawn of modern man on Earth, one particular icy body was gravitationally nudged towards the Sun.  Slowly, over the course of thousands of years it gained speed as it fell towards the Sun.   Dark and unnoticed, all of human history unfolded while it silently fell.  

As it closed in on the Sun, the outgassing of the Sun started to ablate its surface.  It now had a tail made of lost pieces of itself and this allowed humans to first noticed it in 2023.   It swung around the Sun last month and picked up  even more speed and is now on its way back out.  Its velocity is so great it may escape the Sun altogether, or it may swing back around in 80,000 years.  Ironically, its "tail" is now illuminated its path forward as it heads away from the Sun and the Solar Wind drives its tail away from the Sun.

When I first heard that comet A3 was visible to the naked eye, I stepped outside and tried to spot it from my front yard.  Unfortunately trees obscured my view and there is enough light pollution here in the greater Boston area, I wasn't sure I would be able to see it anyway.  I know that a lot of the spectacular pictures taken (like those of the Auroras) are enhanced by high quality cameras or long exposure times.  I wanted to see it with my naked, unaided eyes or not at all.  There is something primal about gazing into the night sky with your own eyes, feeling directly connected to the cosmos through that stream of photons emitted so far away and absorbed by the rods in your very own retinas.  That light you see is truly for your eyes only!

On the next night, Irene and I walked to the school grounds and tried to get a better view from an open field there.  After staring for some time and using an app on my phone to help me look in the right spot, I made out the faintest of hints of the comet.  I looked away and looked back to see if I could still see that faint streak and, sure enough, it persisted.  Try as she might, Irene could not make it out.  The picture above is the closest one I have found to what I saw (all the other ones make it out to be brighter or in greater contrast).  

How adjacent we all are to the wonder of the cosmos!  All I had to do was look in the right spot a short walk from my own house and I beheld a majestic wonder older than all of mankind.

Hello and goodbye friend, you are the widest traveling object I have ever or will ever see.  Fare thee well...

Gifting myself BSO Tickets

 So, I have a tendency to defer things.  I'm not talking about procrastinating on the things I have to do (although I, of course, do fall victim to that as well).  I'm referring to deferring things I want to do "Later, when I have more time (or money) (or energy) (or a cool synergy with another activity)".  The thing is, as John Lennon told us "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."

So, I live near Boston.  Boston has a world class symphony and symphony hall and I like to go.  How often have I been in the 23 years I've lived here?  Not much, but I'll get around to going regularly "later".  So for my 54th birthday this year, I bought myself a simple three concert series with two seats at each:

Izze and I seeing Yuja Wang performing with BSO: Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie 

Seb and I seeing Gubaidulina's Progol and Prokofiev's Symphony No 4

Irene and I seeing Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette

Other people buy a membership to a gym to motivate themselves to work out.  I guess I'm just like them, huh?

Yes, already have my 3 events, 2 seats each for this concert season!

Table Wine, Varietal Wine, and Coffee

I have really strong memories of my uncle bringing back sample from all the red wine vats at the winery and spending time with my aunt determining the assemblage for the table red wine he sold by the liter to locals.  I think he even used a graduated cylinder to quickly do things like "60% merlot, 20% nielluccio, 20% syrah".   The wine he makes this way is always my favorite. To this day, I prefer a good red blend to a straight varietal.

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Flash forward to this afternoon when Irene and I had a coffee dégustation.  Yesterday I hand roasted the same green coffee beans two ways:  One well past the first crack but before the second crack and the other pan I took past the second crack but no further.

note the repurposed bonne maman jars

Now they look pretty similar but they do smell slightly different before brewing and when we tasted them (Irene blind tasting them), we agreed:  The longer roast was richer, a little burnt, and nuttier.  The lighter roast had a more nuanced aroma (like a coffee shop) but disappeared in your mouth.  In short, the lighter roast smelled better, but the darker roast tasted better.  I asked "Should we do a 50/50 blend for a coffee?" Irene responded "60/40 for the dark."

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Wine and coffee snobs are always tooting the value of terroir and the single varietal experience, but let's not loose sight of a good assemblage that fills out all you are looking for from top to bottom in a beverage!

Cooking is Magic, Right?

 File this under:  In life, it is best to appreciate the small things.  

Today, I turned this

Into this

It's a kind of everyday magic this cooking thing, amirite?

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The feedback I got was "Not terrible" and "I wouldn't order it in a restaurant but I'll eat it if you put it in front of me".  But then again, I didn't ask them to eat the ingredients in the first picture first, did I?

Dance as Art

Up until I was 20, I lived my life orthogonal to Dance.  I didn't get it. Not only did I not dance myself, I didn't get it as an art form.  Sure, my friend Jack had taken us all to see that 1985 one-off movie "White Nights"

and I thought it was kinda cool, but only kinda cool because it was so weird and different.  Ballet was something I felt I should like since I was into classical music, but honestly it left me uninspired.

Then, on a whim, I took my girlfriend to see the Margaret Jenkins dance company at Purdue. Well, I was simply blown away.  I thought it was amazing.  It was like going to a dynamic modern art exhibit with a soundtrack.  I really felt like I had never seen something that cool before.*  I went on to catch every modern dance show that came through West Lafayette (there were not many).  

Then, when I moved to Pittsburgh, I bought season tickets to their modern dance series downtown and I caught maybe 4 shows a year from 1993-1995.  I went by myself since I didn't know anyone else who was into it.  I got to see the Martha Graham Dance Company, Alvin Ailey Dance Co,  and many other amazing performances.  The one that really got me was Bill T Jones' Still/Here.  It was the first time (and only 1 of 2 times in my entire life (the other being Nick Cave)) when I was moved to buy a commemorative T-Shirt at the venue.  I still wear it occasionally with reverence to this day.**

After I left Pittsburgh, I kind of left that passion behind.  Pittsburgh was also the place where I actually went out dancing with friends too (the Upstage near campus, and the Metropol downtown were the spots).  Funny I never before realized that I left both dancing for fun and dancing as art behind around the same time!

Fast forward to this year when a good friend asked me to catch a dance performance that he was unable to attend.  The performance was here in town and featured original but classically-inspired and informed Indian dance.  The choreographer (Pallavi Nagesha) was on stage with the musicians and the solo dancer (Revati Masilamani) was simply amazing.  

Watching her precision, athleticism, grace, and physical story-telling was a real treat and brought back all that appreciation I had had for dance-as-art.  It wasn't anything like what I had gone to in my youth, but dance as an embodiment of expression is universal.

Funny that a friend I have hardly ever seen since my Alabama days would recommend a dance performance in my current hometown from his current residence in Germany. Being the only white person in attendance, it brought me back to the awkward self-awareness I had in Pittsburgh when mid 20's Ken went to those performance alone as well.  But, in both cases, once the dancing started, I was transported and transfixed.  

You know, that friend in Germany also saw White Nights in 1985 with Jack.  Life is funny with its twists and turns, isn't it?

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*I remember asking "Did you like it?" and she laughed "Yes, but not as much as you!"

** Years later, a random guy stopped me in a grocery store in Houston and pointed at the T-shirt and asked "Bill T Jones?"  I smiled and agreed.  He looked stunned and stood visibly struggling emotionally for a moment, then said "Very cool shirt", and walked away in a daze.

Visiting Umass

 I lead a dual life.  At school, in class, I am an extravert.  I greet students in the hallway, make small talk, behave semi-normally.  But, outside of school, I'm a recluse.  I don't go out unless I have to and basically spend my time with my family and that's it.

Last weekend was Izze's birthday so I drove out Friday to bring her home for the weekend.  As a break in the driving, I asked her to take me to one of the famous "best campus food in the country" dining halls before turning around and driving home.  (sushi bar, cheesecake, and coffee if you must know (and all quite good I confess))

Now I know lots of my former students are at Umass but I had Dad hat firmly on and so I was taken aback when this college kid emerges from the crowd in the dining hall with a surprised "Mister Rideout?".  Next thing you know I'm shaking hands with Skyler and he's filling me in on what he's up to.  While we are eating, I ask Izze, "Think I'll run into any other WHS alums on the way out?"

Sure enough Bella calls me over on my way out and we chat for a moment as well.  Then outside, we run into Trisha on her way in:

Sometimes I think about the fact that there are roughly 2000 adults out there that have spent a year listening (well, at least pretending to listen!) to me wax poetic about the beauty of physics and tell some bad jokes and the same old classic stories from my former life, but rarely have I had such an unexpected density of random encounters... Dare I say it was kind of nice???

Cooking and Music

"Why do you like making wraps so much?" Iz recently asked me.

"It's like when I make spaghetti sauce from scratch - I love the creativity of using whatever I find in the refrigerator."

Cooking is fun in many ways, but as a joyful spontaneous act is one of my favorites.  Cooking is like music:  sometimes you listen to classical (oven roasted chicken, broiled salmon), sometimes an old pop favorite (burgers-n-dogs), and sometimes you are in the mood for jazz!

Top: homemade hummus spread, romaine lettuce, tomato, heart of palm, hard boiled egg, roasted red pepper  
Bottom: celery, tomato, spinach, carrot, potato, onion, mushroom (blended)

I recently rediscovered an old frozen boneless leg of the lamb in the freezer.  That night we had lamb kabobs:

Cheers!

homebrew black ipa

Yosemite, Fortune Cookies, and The Melting Pot

While out soaking in the amazing views on a recent visit out West, we stumbled upon a small sign indicating a "Chinese Laundry" was just down the road from a historic hotel.  On a whim, we checked it out and found a fascinating little exhibit detailing the service roles fulfilled by Chinese immigrants of the 1800's (men doing laundry, cooking, and gardening).

Mixed in was a story of a semi-famous chef, Tie Sing, who would (circa 1915) write personalized messages to each guest in Chinese and English on their last evening tucked into pastry.

Now, I have long known that the idea of a 'Chinese Fortune Cookie' is not a real Chinese thing but rather an Americanism that only appears in Chinese restaurants in the United States.  Thinking I had stumbled upon the origin story for 'Chinese' cookies, I did a little research upon our return.  Turns out the origin is more Japanese than Chinese.  Apparently the proto-fortune cookie first appeared in Japan in the 1870's and then was imported with Japanese immigration in the late 1800's and early 1900's, transforming into the version of the cookie we know by the 1910's.  Japanese food was not yet popular in America but americanized Chinese food was really taking off, so many Japanese immigrants opened Chinese restaurants.  Add on the internment of the Japanese during WWII and the general unpopularity of all things Japanese then (Even in the 1980's my American grandparents had friends who refused to ever eat in a Japanese restaurant!)... well the false association of this uniquely American cookie with China became complete.   Around this time these "fortune tea cakes" became known as "fortune cookies" 

By Ksayer1 - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ksayer/5452373550/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54564896

Only in America can it become de facto that you get a modified Japanese pastry with every order at a Chinese restaurant.  So, if you see racist tropes that make use of the fortune cookie - know that the wrongness of it all is really much deeper than most realize...

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P.S. Later on this same trip we learned that the name of the park, "Yosemite", was derived from a derogatory term ("they are killers") a neighboring tribe had for the actual indigenous tribe of the park.  How uniquely American is that?

Thirty-Six Years

It's been 36 years since all four of us shared a common spot on the space-time continuum, but last weekend a daughter's wedding celebration was the catalyst that made it happen in New York City.  

Turns out if you share your formative years with some kindred spirits, you may well be able to go 36 years and then just pick up where you left off.  

Lucky am I to have had such friends in those formative years and doubly lucky again to get this opportunity to hang with the fellas:

"Belle brochette de quinquagénaires” is what the Ton-Ton said when he saw this last picture.

Tears, Jokes about Tears, and Jokes about Jokes about Tears

I'm actually not proud that I have had a few students cry through the years (invariably upon the return of a test).  However, it is also true that I joke about crying a lot in class.  It is a running gag in my classes that I am cold, heartless and was drawn to the profession by the opportunity to make kids cry.  I think most of the students know I am joking but you never know... teenagers do tend to personalize everything.  One student told me this year: "You know, you are used to making these kind of remarks before you were masking and people could see you smiling while you made them, but now that you mask - we just don't know..."

So I was quite jealous when my colleague showed me that in her end-of-the-year loot, she had a mug titled "for the tears of my students".  What about me?  Isn't this my joke?  Well, when I got home I unpacked a gift from AS and was quite vindicated to see this gem:

Quite the meta statement, is it not?  That twist of capturing them warm... well, now that's just delightfully perverse.

I am so looking forward to sipping from the mug on opening day in the fall while laying out the syllabus in honors physics...

Graduation

 Well, the day finally rolled around: Isabelle has graduated from high school.  That seemed really fast in the rearview mirror!

Every year, the graduating class asks some of their teachers to march and sit with them ("marshals").  I've been to my fair share, but this year was obviously a bit different.  It turns out there are a lot of teacher-kids in this particular graduating class.  Here is a collection of parent-marshals:

Several former students came back to snap a picture after the ceremony.  Here's one picture with a cohort from the astronomy class that was shared with me:

And there were even some former students from farther back in time who popped out of the audience afterwards too!  For example, The Hive showed up:

Turns out, this was the first graduation Seb has ever attended and the first since her own that Irene had attended.  As I told a student who didn't want to attend, a big reason for the ceremony is actually for your family rather than for you!  I guess that might be what some call wisdom (at least for me it represents a more enlightened attitude to rites-of-passage and ceremonies in general as compared to how I thought about them in my youth!)

 

Sarcastically Yours

Years ago an administrator said to me "Sarcasm is not an appropriate form of humor when dealing with kids."  Now, he was talking about a different teacher, so I didn't say anything out loud but I thought to myself "Oh boy..."  I mean, I don't think I could make it through a single class without using sarcasm. I even give lectures on sarcasm sometimes!

Luckily most students seem to get it (at least by the end of the year!).  I was reminded about this valuable part of their education I provide by a recent gift from JS alongside an older (15 years ago?) gift from a former student ( I can remember her face and where she sat, but her initials escape me):

Dial it in; You control the dial

I was talking to my good buddy WW over the weekend.  In a far ranging conversation in which he shared the many interesting projects he has undertaken lately and some insights he has had about life, he turned to me and asked me what I've been up to.  After an awkward pause in which I mentally scrambled to come up with anything half as interesting as his endeavors, I finally lamely said "Lately I've had the realization that I oscillate between feelings of 'impending  doom' and a kind of internal 'unwarranted bliss'.  The interesting thing is that I think I can control the dial on that myself.  It seems like this is where so many self-help gurus, religions, meditative practices, etc. are trying to say in their own way and so I want to work on that myself to get better at controlling that internal dial."

His answer: "Yes, absolutely."

Ever since, I've had this image of an old analog meter with a single needle and dial that reads "Feelings of Impending Doom" on one side and "Unwarranted Internal Bliss" on the other.  I fed this sketch into an art AI and got this:

my rough sketch

AI generated art from the sketch above

Not exactly what my mind's eye sees, but I can just adjust my mental analog control knob and be happy about it...

From Blixa to Warren

From Her to Eternity is kind of a sacred song to me.  I associate it with a young Nick Cave - when he was a lot more rough around the edges - when Blixa was still a Bad Seed.  It was my introduction to Nick in the all-time-great Wenders film "Wings of Desire".

So, I finally got around to watching the entire Distant Sky concert footage and I was stunned when, 32 minutes into the concert, he breaks out The Line: "I want to tell you about a girl..." and into it he went... I was floored how energetic and intense his performance was after all these years.  But how were they going to replace/reproduce that iconic Blixa guitar howl/pluck/grind sound?  Why, with Warren Ellis abusing his amped up violin of course...  amazing.

From 1987 to 2017

From Berlin to Copenhagen

From Blixa to Warren

From Guitar to Violin

Blixa on the left (1987), Warren on the right (2017)

Nick is 30 on the left and 60 on the right.

Walk and Cry, Nick.  Walk and Cry.

Space Mission Reminds me of my kids

Today, JS was doing her quarter four presentation in astronomy on "The Future of Telescopes".  One of her featured telescopes is the SVOM being launched later this year.   The Space-based Variable Objects Monitor designed to investigate gamma ray bursts.

When she described it as a "Franco-Chinese"mission as the Chinese and French space agencies are working together on it, I called out from the back of the room "A Franco-Chinese mission: Just like my kids!" (Teachers make the worst students 'tis true).

Half the class laughed as they got the joke, the other half laughed because it just sounded weird.  The student I was sitting next to leaned over and said "are you French or something?".  Apparently I haven't been talking about myself enough this year!

Hot or Cold; Cooking or Cooked.

Today, an exhausted student (NM) told me in the middle of her test "Mr. Rideout - I'm cooked."

Now, last week, when she was tearing through a physics worksheet, she proudly proclaimed "I'm cooking!"

Makes me think about the oft contrasted generational uses of "hot" or "cool" which basically mean the same thing in slang, depending on your preferred decade.  

It's kinda fire to think about how hot it is to be cooking but how not cool it is when you're cooked, huh?Sick.

Amperes: Lazy from the start

The metric unit of current is an Ampere, commonly abbreviated as an Amp.

Why then do we call the device that measure this an "Ammeter"?  I can find no other reason than elision. But why actually make the official, written word drop it too.  After all, we keep the second 'e' in speedometer (call it a "speed-o-meter" I instruct my students, not a "spedohmeter", I have yet to make a dent in public pronunciation despite 22 years of effort).

After complaining to my class about this, a few students grumbled that they would prefer the voltmeter to be called a 'volmeter' to even up matters.

I wondered if a more regulated language like French falls into this sloppiness.  Unsurprisingly, the official French word is the whole thing:

Technology and Education

 Talking with a colleague (PG) at a faculty meeting the other day and we both kind of communally articulated the following observation about modern education and technology:

The efficiencies of technology that are so valuable in the workplace are exactly antithetical to education.  Learning is a necessarily inefficient process; attempts to make it more efficient actually interfere with learning. Students must experience cognitive dissonance, wrestle with new ideas, and messily create new schemas over repeated attempts at understanding.

As a school we are considering a ban on cell phones, but I think we go one step further and ban the use of laptops during the school day too.  All these tools and crutches that are so useful to adults are just distracting students.  I feel foolish even suggesting this as my entire pedagogy has become dependent on student access to laptops through the years, but that doesn't make me wrong for suggesting it...

Prune to Grow

 Every winter I prune our hydrangea brutally.  It makes me feel bad.

But then, every summer (so far),  it grows like wildfire:

Keep your eyes on the long term goal, people.  Sometimes a little short term pain is worth the long term gain.

All in a week's work

 Sometimes you have to take the time to acknowledge that funniness is all around us.  Sometimes you can point it out and sometimes others are doing it for you.  Here's some random snapshots from my professional life April 2024:

Grading lab reports on the "Build your own mobile" project:

Next up: The dreaded "reply all".  In my defense, I try not to reply all unless there a heavy amount of snark involved: