Umberto Eco, Dan Brown, and Leon Foucault

Years ago, when Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was the big summer read (can't even count the number of people who recommended that book to me!), I used to play the game "Judge people by whether they mention Umberto Eco when they mention Dan Brown".  Of course, almost no one ever did (either they don't make the connection between Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" and "Da Vinci Code" or else they do and don't want to sound pretentious).

Of both books, I remember one big take away from each after forgetting all the details:
After Dan Brown:  "Wow, I must be pretty smart - I figured out all those puzzles right away!"
After Umberto Eco: "Wow, every deep insight I've ever had is someone else's trivial reference in a complex overlay of intersecting ideas."

Seriously though, I should reread Foucault's Pendulum for I remember profoundly the contrasting concepts of belief as embodied by the Pendulum itself:  Whereas religion's Faith is untestable; faith in science is testable.

Last summer, we saw the original Foucault Pendulum (well, almost - the original bob was off to the side as it has been damaged during a fall) in the Musee d'Arts et Metiers :

Afterwards, Irene and I were commenting to friends of just how much more popular Sainte Chapelle is these days than on our previous visits to Paris when they responded with "Yes, ever since the Da Vinci Code..."  Irene and I both responded with a groan of deep disappointment:

The mix of derivative and original work that I mused about in 2010 is now complete and inseparable.

Floppy Drives, Paris, and Feeling Old

As circular hard drives start to disappear, yet another computer phenomena will have come and gone  in my lifetime.  Here, at the Musee d'Arts et Metiers (as recommended to us by our good friend WW) that we visited in Paris this summer is a history of all magnetic storage devices.  Proudly (sadly?), I have worked with each one pictured here at one time or another:

What's a Floppy Drive?

(Thanks to Isabelle and Irene who took the photos for me!)

Ouch!

So, we've started watching "The Flash" as a family.  Here I am thinking it's good, wholesome family fun, when (out of the blue!) they pull this whammy of a sequence in episode 11 (season one):

Good physicist guy is caught coming out of a lab by evil head physics guy!  Then good guy threatens to reveal evil physicist's master plan (involving a combination of improbable, impossible, and needlessly convoluted physics) to the world, so evil physicist fights back.

(and here it comes...)

Evil physicist punches back with the hardest blow imaginable to a respectable physicist:

Oooh, the burn. 

Make the pain stop, please!

Thinking about Thinking

After this shot, I told Seb we should have had him looking at me and pondering my looking at the Thinker while thinking...
Still...

It's a small world

In physics class, we've been talking about the Standard Model, Quantum Field Theory, and the Higgs Boson.  I found a Nova episode that seemed to tie it all together.  I didn't preview it but luckily it was pretty spot-on content-wise and the class and I were having a fun time watching it and engaging in some light banter in just how over-dramatic Nova was being and how funny some of the scenes were when, towards the end, they were interviewing Dr. S. J. Gates, Jr. on his supersymmetry ideas on the MIT campus when (for no apparent reason) they continued the interview in the iconic MIT Chapel. 

As they had Dr. Gates strumming on the abstract metal sculpture for no apparent recent, I announced to the class casually "that's where I was married".  They looked at me incredulously expecting some kind of joke.  I said "Seriously, no regular church would let Irene marry me!".

2018 Prom

Astro Field Trip

Haystack Observatory

42 WHS seniors + Mr. Froberg + myself visiting the famous radio telescope!