Coming up on Thanksgiving and my thoughts turn to...

... Corsica of course!

http://riddicisms.blogspot.com/2009/11/thanksgiving-in-corsica.html

Are the events of that day so seared into my brain that it seems like yesterday or was it the act of writing down the story and reliving it every time I read it that makes me think I remember it like yesterday?

Hey You Guys!

I have always felt that the word "guys" is gender neutral despite having been told otherwise by many different people from many different walks of life (I just read an article recently about how a new teacher was put down by a veteran for his over use of "guys" when talking to his class (containing both guys and gals presumably).  Somehow I just can't shake my own usage of "guys" to mean both genders.  However, just recently, I've had a couple of revelation about the word "guys":

1)  My favorite show as a kid was PBS's "The Electric Company" (Morgan Freeman's original role!).  I only recently recalled the show's opener: "hey you guys!" I knew even back then that the show was shouting out to girl fans as well as boy fans!




2)  Guy Fawkes Night.  Ever hear of that one?  I hadn't - but when someone mentioned participating in one this November 5, I googled it to find out what was behind the mask.  Turns out this "Guy" is the origin of the word 'guy'.  We call guys 'guys' because this Guy Fawkes is so famous.  He went from real person to effigies which were made and sold to be burned on Nov 5. to being synonymous with raggedy persons of ill repute to being a general non pejorative term for men to (and I quote webster's online) "used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex"

Now that is an evolution in usage!  I think I won't beat myself up too much over calling a group of people "guys" any more.  All language is contextual, right, guys?

Brunch Coordinates

A couple of friends with kids were visiting for brunch.  Explaining how their 5 year old was trying to define 'bear', they said he did it this way:
"You know a Polar Bear?  It's like that except brown not white.  Also, it's not polar, just regular."
Being comfortably in the presence of fellow nerds, I chime in: "Ah, a Cartesian Bear then?"

No groans and no confusion, just some chuckles and nods of approval.

Before I feel too witty, I googled an image for this post with "cartesian bear" and apparently this is a common thought.

Aww shucks...

Making Jokes

So, my usual m.o. in class is to teach for a couple of seconds then make a bad joke, laugh at it myself, point out to the class how funny I am, and then berate them for not appreciating me enough.  Something along the lines of:

"When Newton wrote Principia, no one was forcing him to accelerate mankind's understanding of science." (slight pause) "Get it?  See what I did there?  Forcing?  Accelerate?  I'm funny." (serious students looking perturbed at their learning being interrupted, non serious students annoyed that I might actually think that was funny, and politically savvy students fake laughing).  "Oh - tough audience today."  (Sigh)

So, imagine my surprise when today I inadvertently made a funny while talking about circular motion (the need for a tangential velocity coupled with a centripetal force).  After some off topic remarks by some of the clowns* in the class, I try to bring us back to the physics with a "Usually, I like it when we go off on a tangent, but this is a bit much..."  Then I pause in confusion as they are all groaning and laughing at me.  Then I realize what I had done and promptly said "I gotta blog this."

Am I training them or are they training me?
 

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*This is the same class where one day when they were leaving, I said "Usually, I'm the weirdest person in a room, but in the class, I'm not even in the top five!"

Analogies Analogies

  As I was going over the equations of motion, I switched from using 'x' for position to 'd' for displacement in the middle of a problem.  This caused a few students to become confused. After explaining that the equations should be read for content and not just followed to the letter, I berated them unfairly by saying "If you are reading a book and the parlor in chapter one becomes a living room in chapter 2, do you stop reading?"
  Later the same day, in a different class, I was warning them that we were going to vectorize our equations of motion and start solving the equations in x and y direction simultaneously...as they all groaned in dismay I quickly interjected "Hey - if you are learning French, you might as well learn German too."  Then we all looked at each other and started to pick apart just how terrible that analogy was, so I quickly modified it to "Hey - once you learn to speak French..." I tilted my head 90 degrees and spoke to them sideways "...you can speak French like this too!"

Inspiried by a Typo

A student in Astronomy accidentally typed the "loves of stars" instead of the "lives of stars".  I thought to myself, Hmmmm....

So here is my response:

We met at first, dispersed and cold

With gravity's love, our fates foretold

We drew together tight and bold

Fusing together, two became one

For 10 billion years, we were the Sun

But eventually our love was undone

We separate: one grew bigger, redder, and colder

Into itself the rest contracted and started to smolder

Alpha alpha alpha, the core grew older and older

Dwarf-like and tiny, merely a carbon sack

I spin and recall when we began to contract

As memories of love fade, white into black

Blast from the Past

One fun thing about a big move is the uncovering of old gems that would otherwise lie forgotten in an obscure corner of the basement.  Check out this 1978 second edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  (this is before the game became a cliché and genre unto itself).

In the same box, I found a user's guide to "Gamma World" and an entire box of Traveller paraphernalia...
Oh yeah, I gots my nerd bona-fides!