8:52 and George eats at 9:00. His plaintive hunger meows echo through the hallway. “You are not forgotten”, I say. This does not seem to satisfy him. Me neither: seems a bit melodramatic. Next strategy: try to teach him to tell time. We’ll start with digital clocks first.
You know you’re growing up when you’re much more interested in the decorating and appliance choices made in the kitchens of Facebook pictures than you are in the people in the pictures. Also under development: maturity.
Words (phases) I really really hate for reasons not worth elaborating:
See also: shitty portmanteaux.
Coralie Bickford-Smith designs covers for Penguin Books. A few years ago, she did an amazing series for Penguin Classics.
I want to buy the collection, just because the covers look so great. I hope the typographic choices on the interior of the books are as good as the design of the covers.
A bit from Bickford-Smith in a 2008 interview about the book covers:
I wanted to create sumptuous books for people to enjoy, cherish and pass on.
I think she succeeded brilliantly; indeed, my first thought when I saw these was they have a timeless, heirloom feel.
Katy sent along this really seriously great rendition Gershwin’s “Summertime” by Billy Stewart. As tends to be the case with these things… the video doesn’t add a whole heck of a lot to the music. So queue up the music on this beautiful 60° Wednesday (while you are trying to do some work and avoid thinking about the outdoors) and enjoy the sweet stylings of Billy Stewart.
In the New Yorker article Time Bandits lies the best plain English description of special relativity that I have ever run across (you owe it to yourself to read this carefully — it’s worth it):
Since light is an electromagnetic wave (this had been known since the nineteenth century), its speed is fixed by the laws of electromagnetism; those laws ought to be the same for all observers; and therefore everyone should see light moving at the same speed, regardless of the frame of reference. Still, it was bold of Einstein to embrace the light principle, for its consequences seemed downright absurd.
Suppose—to make things vivid—that the speed of light is a hundred miles an hour. Now suppose I am standing by the side of the road and I see a light beam pass by at this speed. Then I see you chasing after it in a car at sixty miles an hour. To me, it appears that the light beam is outpacing you by forty miles an hour. But you, from inside your car, must see the beam escaping you at a hundred miles an hour, just as you would if you were standing still: that is what the light principle demands. What if you gun your engine and speed up to ninety-nine miles an hour? Now I see the beam of light outpacing you by just one mile an hour. Yet to you, inside the car, the beam is still racing ahead at a hundred miles an hour, despite your increased speed. How can this be? Speed, of course, equals distance divided by time. Evidently, the faster you go in your car, the shorter your ruler must become and the slower your clock must tick relative to mine; that is the only way we can continue to agree on the speed of light. (If I were to pull out a pair of binoculars and look at your speeding car, I would actually see its length contracted and you moving in slow motion inside.) So Einstein set about recasting the laws of physics accordingly. To make these laws absolute, he made distance and time relative.
That’s one great explanation. The “shorter ruler, slower clock” phrase is particularly helpful. Another critical thing to remember is that this all occurs relative to the observer.
So, the slow speed of motion within the vehicle is only seen by the stationary person with binoculars… it is not experienced by the person within the vehicle traveling close to the speed of light.
Special relativity actually was illustrated quite wonderfully in the 1970s. Scientists used cesium-atomic clocks; these extremely accurate clocks base their resonant frequency on the decay of a cesium isotope, instead of the wildly inaccurate (by comparison) resonance of quartz. Current iterations of these clocks lose about 1 second every 17 to 30 million years. These clocks were put on jets which were flown around the world twice, in opposite directions. The idea was that the cesium clocks aboard the planes would record less time passing than the stationary clocks on the ground, which were used as a reference. To reference back to the New Yorker article: it would be as though you, sitting there, were watching these clocks tick slower because they were in the car chasing the light beam. This is, indeed, EXACTLY what happened. When the clocks were compared after the flights, the clocks aboard the planes recorded less time passing than did the clocks on the ground.
This type of almost incomprehensibly small difference in recorded time doesn’t seem that important, until you link together a global network of satellites designed to closely track your movements on the ground. You know… GPS. So, get this: if you just toss satellites up into orbit, they start seeing time passing differently than your computers on the ground, and the system gets all screwed up because all the computers can’t agree on time. So, scientists set the clock speed of the processors on the satellites to be 10.22999999543 MHz, and the speed of the earth-bound computers to be 10.23 MHz. If they hadn’t done this, along with a few other seemingly esoteric tweaks… your GPS in your car, the one that is supposed to make life so simple, wouldn’t work worth beans.
Science, even the crazy out-there relativistic science, matters in our daily lives.
The freeze-thaw this season has produced an extremely large amount of ice. Our walkway in front of the house was covered in about 4 inches of solid ice after a few weeks of the cold-warm-cold cycles. These weather patterns have also created the worst pothole season in my memory… which is where this story begins.
On the 28 of February, while coming down the steep Franklin Avenue hill in the dark, I hit a giant pothole associated with a manhole cover. If the pothole were described in dental terms, you’d call it an “insufficient margin with recurrent decay”. I was going about 25 miles an hour, and for a few seconds after I hit the hole, I thought I would be able to regain control. That, alas, was not possible. I don’t really remember the instant between bobbling my front handlebars and hitting the ground. I do, however, remember the sound of the 1000 denier Cordura of my Chrome Metropolis (the best bike bag I’ve ever owned, period) sliding along the ground and slowing me to a stop. BZZZZZZZZZZZ is my first memory after being upright — it echoed in my head as I slid along the asphalt. Slowly, headlights came up on me and my bike, and I looked down at the yellow street line directly below my head. I should have broken my arm was all I could really think. Thankfully, I only suffered some serious road rash. The friction with the roadway actually heated up my garments enough to melt parts of my jacket and gym shorts (which I had on beneath my scrubs, preventing me from ending up shorts-less). The large soft tissue trauma on my right elbow seems to be calcifying a little bit, but I think my joint will make a full recovery. This is important because you can get so far behind so fast in these dental lab courses… I am very very thankful my right arm made it through the crash in one piece. So thankful.
One of the drivers of the cars behind me must have called the city, because the hole was actually fixed not more than 3 days after my accident.
I am really really looking forward to warmer days with more sunlight, so I can see the road. Once the street cleaners go through, I get to once again ride my good bike: a 2009 Specialized Allez Double. I am EXTREMELY excited to hop back on the skinny tires.
David Brooks - What Obama Stands For:
Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.
David Brooks is a GREAT columnist. I’d love to hear him speak somewhere, sometime.
From “the more things change, the more they stay the same” desk at tumbledry HQ: a quote that, I think, you may find applicable. (I hope Katy finds it enlightening, as well):
I will not go for a doctorate, because it would be of little help to me, and the whole comedy has become boring.
Can you guess the source? I just got screwed over on a lab practical; I’ll tell the whole story when I have more time. Spring break is days away.
P.S. Albert Einstein.
“It ain’t over till it’s over” may be tautological in nature, but it sure sounds profound to me. Motivating, even.
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