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 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?