Chess Rap 2026

This may be the end of an era...

Video creds to JM!

A Sweet Thank You

 Through the years, I have gotten a few cookies as thank you's from students - but rarely have they spanned so widely across the curriculum as these from KT:

In case you can't tell, it's a rocket ship (suspiciously similar to Veritasium's rocket ship!), a Wheatstone bridge circuit, and a free body diagram.  I ate the free body diagram one arrow at a time but I had to do it quickly since it started accelerating away once I broke the equilibrium...

Immigrant Moms Get the Job Done

 

 I am the son of an immigrant Mom

My wife is the daughter of an immigrant Mom

I was 21 when I saw this movie that showed me the richness of the melting pot that is the USA.

I didn't even know there were Indians in Mississippi nor that there were Indians from Uganda (!)

This Mamdani fella has been making the news.

I heard he has an immigrant Mom too.

Today, I found out his immigrant Mom is the director of that movie

Old Blogs, Old Innumeracies, Old Star Treks

 Years ago, I started to keep a second blog to track all the innumeracies I was stumbling across in mainstream media.  Like so many things in life, I just let it go after a while.  The blog is still out there, and I thought to check on it when my brother brought my attention to an odd throw-away line in an old Star Trek episode:

The Media's Innumeracy and Sciencific Illiteracy: Nice one, Kirk

(I assume the misspelling in the title of the blog was intentional on my part?  I certainly hope so...)

Maybe I will make another post over there in less than 10 years (or did I mean 1 year (or 100?) - what's a zero between friends?).

Ken as Dog or Dog as Ken

My father once told me you can tell a lot about a dog owner by watching their dog.

But now that SJ has successfully imagined what I would look like as a dog (she said she was defeated by trying to match a dog to me and instead just imagined me as a dog), I can take my father's wisdom to a whole new level:

photo cred goes to Isabelle!

This little clay sculpture has already claimed a spot in my heart 

(or am I in the heart of this dog?)

:)

What Day is It?

 Astro class 2025:

Regular

Goofy

Tardy

Me, Space-Time, and Cycles

         "There is no such thing as an empty space...Space-Time does not claim existence on its own, but only as a structural quality of the [gravitational] field."  - Albert Einstein, 1952 

This idea of Space & Time not really meaning anything outside of the context of gravity is something I've been trying to wrap my mind around ever since I started teaching astronomy: The ever expanding universe creating space-time as the masses separate and the meaningless of space-time outside of or before the universe ( as opposed to the Newtonian view that the stage already set and the universe plays out on that pre-existing stage).  

Before the discovery of Dark Energy (our short hand for the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe), most scientists thought the universe would end in a Big Crunch.  The story was that gravity would eventually win over the expansion and bring everything crashing together again... and maybe we could return to the Big Bang.  Such a cool idea since this eliminates the awkwardness of a one-and-done Universe with a questionable beginning and final end.

However, with Dark Energy, it appears we are doomed to the Big Chill and we will be forever haunted with the strange uniqueness of our finite-in-time Universe.

Or are we?

I recently came across this idea of Roger Penrose  (Conformal Cyclic Cosmology) that, when the Universe ends in its ultimately highest entropy state with either no mass or mass evenly distributed, Space-Time will once again be meaningless.  Highest entropy begins to look like lowest entropy and, voila, we have recovered the initial conditions of our Universe... so another Big Bang can occur.

Reversing the concept of what Space and Time are is a really powerful frame shift, is it not?  Instead of mass moving around in space and time, mass is the creator of space and time.  Once there is no interesting movement of mass, there are not relationships to have and Space and Time just fade away as meaningful concepts.

Kind of like how Who-I-Am is somehow encoding in the details of the relationships between all these atoms in my body.  It's not actually the atoms themselves, but the interesting relationships between them.  Lay out all my carbons, hydrogens, oxygens, and nitrogens in a regular array and I guarantee you that guy will not be anything like me.  Long after I'm gone though, the elements in my body can be re-used in some future self-aware sentient creature.  

"There is no such as an eternal Ken Rideout, Ken Rideout does not exist on his own.  He is an emergent property of the C H O N atoms in his body."