Narcissism

Near the end of the school year, I was kicked out of my usual classroom and was hanging out alone in a different classroom.  I noticed there were a lot of old and recent yearbooks (I think we called them 'annuals' in my youth) on a shelf and so I promptly looked for pictures of myself.  I think this is what anyone would do, but please don't tell me if it isn't.  

I decided it was my only chance to take a timeline of pics of the senior superlatives for teachers.  Not every yearbook was there (2008 was my first year at WHS), but most were there.  I don't think anyone else would be interested in these pictures but this blog is kind of like a public diary, so let's chalk this one up as an entry I might like to look back at when I retire.

P.S.  Special Thanks to BH for helping to fill in a missing year!

2022

P.P.P.S.

2023

Imperfections are Beautiful

Around 1610, Galileo added another item to his list of first-human-ever-to list:  He observed Sunspots on the Sun.  

Not only did this indicate imperfection in the heavens (in the most heavenly of objects no less) but the Sunspots moved on successive days and thus indicated the Sun itself rotated.

Now, many felt that this was a blow to perfection and to the concept of heavenly perfection specifically.  But it seems it was a gateway to the greater beauty that science can reveal to us.

Four hundred years later, we have people who study the Solar Atmosphere and Solar Weather (Heliophysics).  And, now the post office has wowed us with the beauty of Sun in an amazing array of images (each image is an artistic rendition of a colorized photo of the sun taken outside of the visible spectrum (IR, radio, etc.):

From the USPS:

"Printed with a foil treatment that adds a glimmer to the stamps, the images on these stamps come from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a spacecraft launched in February 2010 to keep a constant watch on the sun from geosynchronous orbit above Earth. ...

One of the stamps highlights sunspots, two feature images of coronal holes, two show coronal loops, two depict plasma blasts, one is a view of an active sun that emphasizes its magnetic fields, and two show different views of a solar flare."

Beautifully imperfect is the source of all energy for us imperfect beings, no?

(Even my imperfect picture with the flash of my phone showing in the center of the picture just seems to imply a sunlike effect in the middle of the array of pictures!)

More info on the stamps here: https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/0618-usps-issues-sun-science-forever-stamps.htm

 

Tiger ≠ Tire

A few months back, Mrs. Cowell introduced me to the Whovian Running Club.  They organize virtual runs for charity for Doctor Who nerds like us.

Anyway, here we are sporting our medals from the latest event:

Then, to be goofy, I say 'let's do an action shot':

Then our photographer (Mrs. Giglio) says "Make a tiger".  

But I hear "Make a tire".... which I find VERY confusing.

I then explain and show what I thought we were being asked to do:

When asked "Why would you even think that?", I give it my characteristic "what?" protest of innocence:

Apparently making tiger faces is a thing whereas making a tire is not... who knew?

Just another day in the life...

Intersectionalist Philatelist

What is one to do if one has a beloved (but neglected) stamp collection and one is a lover of Star Wars but one does not send much snail mail any longer?

I wonder...

Meta meme

I had asthma as a child so I avoided running.  As an adult, I have been known to run a 5K every now and then, but my major goal has always been to simply finish.  A recent purchase of a treadmill has inspired me to try hit a 5K in 30 mins or less.  Today I hit that goal (I hear you laughing, YL - remember I told you to reach out to me when you are 50 or 51 and then we'll talk!).

Every time I hit the treadmill (at first because it was winter-time in New England and now because the pollen count is out of control), I have the same images pop into my head.  Every single time.

One is this scene from Gattaca:  

The other is the opening montage from the Six Million Dollar Man:

It occurs to me that almost everything I do has a meta-memory associated with it (even a simple stretch begets recollections of associated memories).  Either an old memory of my own or something from a movie or a book or something... Reminds me of the flashbacks to older black and white movies embedded within Mon Oncle d'Amerique which I always think of as informing the hero what it means to be manly.  When I think on this movie's influence on me, I'm also bringing up the influences on that movie, right?

Maybe these cultural touchstones speak to me because they are manifestations of some kind of universal psyche.

                                                -or- 

Maybe I am simply a collection of memes accumulated over my lifetime

                                                  ?

Time, Free Will, and Death

(A) If you think about four dimensional space-time a lot, it will change your perspective on things.  It certainly affected the man who arguably spent the most time thinking about it, Herr Albert Einstein. 

(B) Lately, AP and I have been talking a lot about free will and determinism.  

(C) I once read that if you think about life as a process with birth and death marking the beginning and end points rather than thinking about life as a state function (where life is a '1' and death is a '0' I suppose) then it is much easier to deal with the death of a loved one or to contemplate one's own death.

(A+B+C) Imagine, if you will, the dimension of time as a visible dimension like heading West on a map.  Imagine yourself having a high altitude above such a map such that you can look both East (back in time) and West (forward in time).  Your life would be some kind of line segment embedded in this terrain.  The thing is, the line was always there and will always be there.  In this vision of time there may be no free will but it is hard to argue that your life didn't matter either.  Einstein apparently had this kind of vision of time and weighed in on free will as being illusory.  

    Sometimes I have dreams about flying.  Sometimes I have dreams about an out-of-body experience.  But my favorite dreams of all are when I am flying out and over time itself: I am moving over a huge rolling map that began somewhere far to the East with the Big Bang and ends impossible far to the West with the Heat Death of the Universe.  There's so much real-estate beneath me, but I never manage to fly too far from my own world line before I wake up from that place beyond space and time.

Authority-Driven or Data-Driven?

 "Because I said so"

"That's just the way we do things around here"

"He's the boss - so..."

Always disliked those expressions.  I was brought up to be more suspicious than trusting of those in authority positions.  Better to follow where the data leads you than where a 'leader' take you...  That's why studying science always pays dividends no matter what walk of life you eventually find yourself in.

When observing people, I am dismayed by how frequently the argument that simply sounds good or feels right will win.  In physics, I was trained to be suspicious of your intuition and look for confirmation from the experiments and the actual facts.

Years ago a friend of Irene's from MIT was visiting while he was in medical school.  We asked him how he liked it and he said that while he was excited to enter the profession, the education he was receiving wasn't all that great.  "They are just teaching us how to pattern match and to make associations - they are not teaching us how to think like my engineering & science courses did at MIT."  Interesting distinction, huh?

My buddy Erec recently forwarded a fascinating article:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

In it, a historical detective story plays out in which the who-dunnit is the (formerly) commonly accepted standard in the medical community that only particles smaller than 5 microns qualify as airborne.  (hence, droplets containing COVID-19 were, for so long, misidentified by the WHO as not being airborne).  The jarring collision between scientists that study airborne particles in general (who knew the 5 micron cut-off for being airborne was overly low) and the medical community that accepted the handed down cut off of 5 microns sets off the chase.  Long story short, the atmospheric scientists who were data-driven were correct (as we all now know) but the medically trained professionals were slow to pivot away from their 'accepted' cut off value of 5 microns.  Follow the data, people!

 

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_curve )

This whole thing remind me of Lakoff's family-as-a-metaphor-for-government argument:  Conservatives think families should be authority driven whereas liberals believe in the nurturing parent model.  Hence their preferred style of governing. 

I prefer my families nurturing, my governments liberal, and my facts served with a side of data; thank you very much.