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 trieed 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???