A GENIUS IDEA

I had this idea a while back, but I didn't have the technical chops to pull it off. So,  I enlisted my daughter to bring it to fruition:

If you don't get, well, then you don't get it...

Cleaning Out your Subconscious

Step One:  Descend into your subconscious.  Examine what is down there.  Spend some time sorting, weighing, pondering.

Step Two:  Haul out the garbage.  Jettison the stuff weighing you down.

Step Three:  Set up some habits of mind that are positive and healthy for you as you step into the future:

Social Mores and Conservation Laws

You ever notice that it's hard to define exactly what social expectation are but you certainly notice right away if you deviate from those norms (try wearing your speedos to go to the grocery store)?  The more you deviate, the more you will be identified as being out-of-the-norm.  It's the differential that actual winds up defining what the norm is!

In physics, there are these very abstract, hard-to-define conserved quantities:

Momentum

Energy 

Angular Momentum

Charge

Here's the interesting parallel that I just realized today:  Although these conserved quantities are hard to describe and abstract, their rates of change are well understood and approachable:

Rate of change of momentum is ................ Force!

Rate of change of energy is ....................... Power!

Rate of change of angular momentum is... Torque!

Rate of change of charge is........................ Current!

I feel like there is a deep truth here.  Although the deep truths of life  are not readily apparent, one can infer the truth from the importance and weight of their deviations and their rates of change.  

No matter how deep the ocean, it's the waves that get ya!

Follow the clues, people, follow the clues.

Chaffee Elementary, White Middle, and Grissom High

I am from "Rocket City USA" aka Huntsville, Alabama.  We were proud of our NASA connections and all the work done there on rockets, astronaut training, and the Shuttle program.  Little did I know I would grow up to teach what was considered the very water we drank back then and there as a unit in astronomy.

Each year, around this time, I do a deep dive with my astronomy class into the 1960's race to the moon by watching several of these episodes:

    

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_Missions)

Every year, I tear up at times and am deeply moved by what the astronauts went through and what was being accomplished by our country that might have been, in retrospect, the greatest accomplish ever made by a single country.  The hardest hitting, of course is the Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom (likely to have been the first man on the Moon until then), Ed White (first American to do an EVA), and Roger Chaffee.  Although my pathway through the Huntsville Public Schools did not include these, I had friends that went to all of these schools:

Grissom High

White Middle School

Chaffee Elementary

12 year old Kenny: "Who were those guys?  They died in a training fire? Oh okay."

50 year old Mr. Rideout tearing up at the back of the classroom: "Oh, I feel like I knew those guys."

Funny, how time changes your perspective, isn't it?

My OG Physics Textbook

 Sure, I'm proud of the recent publication of my physics book for Barron's.  However, there was another.  Back in 2005 or so, my first crew of AP Physics students at Swampscott noted my complaints about the textbook we were using ("Mr. Rideout, you should write your own textbook!" "Maybe I will, maybe I will").  Well, at the end of the year, they bound all of my various handouts from throughout the year and presenting me with the OG Rideout physics textbook.  Apparently I was still doing my most excellent Commander Riker impression back in those days (Nowadays, my current students don't even know who that is so I haven't done my most excellent impression in quite some time).  

I believe this effort was about 97 % Erinn Phelan, but any of the other students listed in the masthead should feel free to set the record straight!  Reading some of those names this evening took me right back.  I hope they remember the fun times we had - I certainly do.

I casually flipped through the book, finding many handouts that I authored for the first time that year that are still in use in my contemporary classes.  At the very end, I found this transcription of an impromptu lecture that I gave when someone asked me to give them advice for life (I'm guess that was a M. Graul request?):

Wine Labels and Baptisms

 Today, I noticed an old souvenir of a wine bottle in the corner of my den.  It is one of the last remnants of my previous life as a wine importer.  The bottle is the one on the left (back label is below).  For two years I tried my hand at importing four varietals (Chardonnay, Merlot, Aleatico, and Syrah) from the family winery.  I haven't thought about that back label text that I wrote for my importation company "Blackfoot Wines" in at least a decade ...

The other memorial to those years is a cross stitch that Irene made for me years ago (also in the den!):

The bottle on the right is from my cousin's baby's baptism in Corsica a few years back (Yes, my uncle did a novelty bottling for his own grandson!).  Here's a pic from that 2018 day of me holding the star of the show (Saveriu): 

Bad News, Free Will, and Harold Kushner

In a world gone crazy, in every sense:  personal, professional, national, and global - it is hard to not feel the sting of unfairness in the air:  Why me?  Why now?  Why my loved ones?

A few years ago I read an excellent book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People"(Kushner) and my review ends with the punchline of the book for me: "live in the world as it is, not as we want it to be...".

My entire life I've pondered Free Will and have often wondered about the intersection of the determinacy of the laws of the universe and our desire to be the author of our own life story.  Usually I find comfort in the idea of free will around the edges of chaos theory or quantum mechanics.  When asked about the nature of time and free will, Einstein is said to have replied along the lines of "As long as you believe you have free will, that's good enough!"

Today, though, I am wondering, if we are just on a pre-determined rollercoaster ride and our free will is not really a thing but a useful fiction, maybe there is no need for deep regrets or to be mired in introspection or the 'woulda shoulda coulda' trap.  

Just live in the world as it is and enjoy the ride when its enjoyable and enjoy the fact that you get a ride at all when it's not...