Covering the fire is not a ceasefire but it does get you home on time

My mother is a fluent speaker in English but sometimes she lapses into French.  Multiplication and cursing  come to mind.  Interestingly, if she is switching back and forth, she will sometimes struggle to find the word in the language she means to use and will just slip the other language's word in.

On a recent visit, she got off the phone from talking with her brother in French and, while talking to me she said, "In France, Covid is on the rise again and they are thinking of re-instating a couvrefeu".  As my mind was translating this phrase into "cover fire"and thinking maybe she meant "ceasefire", I realized the French 'courvefeu' sounded like "curfew" in English.  Then the lightbulb went off and I realized all at once that that was what she meant and that was where we got the word from in English.  I tried to relate this origin of  'Curfew' to lights out policies for cities during bombing raids in WWII, but Mom said that was too contemporary.  The original French meaning was to literally cover your fire so you don't burn the house down when you go to bed.  (the more cumbersome cessez-le-feu is ceasefire in French. Even worse, proving cover fire for your allies is feu de couverture)

"Be home before it's time for us to cover the fire for the night!" - sounds like a reasonable request.

Bonus pleasure:  This two syllable evolution of a word from a phrase reminds me a lot of Mandarin phrases.  (for the record, Curfew = 宵禁 which seems to be literally "to spend time closely" when I googled the words xiāo and jìn separately.

A Tale of Home 'Improvement'

1. Move into house. Note strange, unattractive, huge fan embedded in ceiling.

2. For the following 8 years, walk under this behemoth and speculate idly how much thermal leaking was happening. Run fan twice (causing great consternation both times) in those 8 years.

3. During recent heat wave reach up and touch metal slats and gather unambiguous data that the thermal leakage is enormous.

4. Decide to remove fan and put in insulation. Look at huge, heavy fan and change plan.

5. Electrically disconnect fan (protecting yourself from forgetful future you or innocent future owner). Stuff in left over insulation from cousin Roger (Thanks, Roger!) between fan and (missing) ceiling.

6. Randomly saw left over drywall from Roger with jig saw (jigsaw saw?) borrowed from Roger as well until that drywall has been rendered into small, useless pieces. However, successfully nail in scrap pieces of 2 by 4's in random locations about the hole as attachment surfaces for drywall.

7. Run to home depot. Purchase 4' x 8' drywall for 3'x3' hole. Realize in parking lot the Sienna can not fit a 4 by 8 of anything. Tool-lessly (cluelessly?), clumsily snap 4 by 8 in half and haul two 4 x 4 sections home.

8. Measure once and cut 6 or 7 times until drywall resembles hole. Screw drywall to 2 x 4's as carefully as they were placed there earlier.

9. Watch 14 youtube videos on how to repair holes in your ceiling.  Ignore all of them and run back to home depot to buy 'mud'. (I know buying the premixed joint compound identifies me as a noob but the single tub cost less than the multi-lifespan amount of the smallest bag of the dry stuff you mix yourself!)

10. Slap mud all along the joints. Happily call in the family to bask in their praise.

11. "When are you going to finish it and paint it white?" was not the desired reaction. In response I slather a Rothko inspired layer all over the surface.

12. Suspicious that this mud dries white I mount a campaign to convince the family this is an improvement to the house.  When I get to the equations of heat transfer, they give up.

13. Victory

14. Consider relabeling disconnected fan switch "countdown to the apocalypse". Too much?  Not sure, I will take the next 8 years to figure out what to do with this switch...

Ruining high school vacations since 2002...

Part of a summer email from a student (NL):

"... and yes I am enjoying my summer very much because I don't have to think about physics anymore HAHA can spend more time with friends and sleep and eat yummy food :D"

(you know that is a legit quote from a teenager because I thought ':D' was a typo at first...)

My response:

File this email under 'Ways my erstwhile physics teacher tries to ruin my summer":

When you "spend more time with friends and sleep and eat yummy food" are you not using an electric field to open an ion channel spanning the cell membrane of some of your neurons thus allowing some charge distribution across the same neural membrane to be altered thereby changing the voltage difference across the membrane?  Doesn't the changing voltage then trigger an action potential which causes another cascade of charges to be released and changes the electric fields near yet another neuron's dendrites which allows the sensation of happiness to arise in your brain?

So you may think you are enjoying your summer without thinking about physics but you most certainly are enjoying that sensation because of physics...

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodgkin%E2%80%93Huxley_model

What a great job I have...

Not your usual tourist

So, I am well aware that I am not normal.  This is what I had Irene take a picture of when we visited Notre Dame in Paris several years ago:

Is it a person in the crowd?  Is the central facade?  No, no, silly - it's that tiny circle on the ground.  Here, take a closer look:

This is the literal origin point for distances in France.  All locations in France are measured from this exact point.  Of course the country that gave us the metric system designated its own national origin point.  All distances are relative but in France, at least they know where they are relative from!  I keep thinking I will work this into a physics lecture when I introduce displacement and velocity, but I never have...

Last week, we visited the port city of Gloucester, MA.  Everyone else was busy snapping pictures of its famous fishermen-lost-at-sea memorial, but I took this picture on the ground just in front of it:

When you need some precision navigation this far north, you must distinguish between magnetic north and 'true' north.  Another topic I love to bring up in class.  Of course, as I took this picture, I was thinking "I wonder if they update that stone carving every few years as magnetic north moves around?"  (I'm guessing the precision is poor enough that the accuracy is still okay for another 50 years or so).

On the waterfront walk to the memorial, we crossed over the Blynman drawbridge.  Everyone else is looking at the boats speeding through the canal while the bridge is open.  Me: "Oh boy - look at the size of those gears!  Lots of torque needed to rotate that huge moment of inertia.  Now this is sightseeing!"

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1nP6yXc1r0)

And closing:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOcOkhh9TeY)

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...