Still Life With "Poba"

It's a lovely cool fall Saturday afternoon, and I'm out in the front yard with Laz. It's been rainy and cold the last couple of days, so the clear skies, slight breeze and bright afternoon sunshine are a welcome change.

Lazarus is playing with a small elevated water table his mama bought him the other day. And a plastic lion. The boy is just carzy about animals right now. He's been particularly fond of playing with a polar bear in the front yard. In fact he's rather into "poba's" in general right now.

He's also started playing with phrases a lot recently, inventing a number of call and response games. "Whose house?" "mama's house" (or Laz's, or Daddy's or Zebra's etc.) "no (noun), nasty (noun). Nasty apple too, and she spilled her milk all over the table.". The latter picked up from a recently rediscovered favorite book.

Back inside now, hanging out on Laz's couch while he watches "Ice Worlds," the Planet Earth episode of choice at the moment. (Again with the "poba".)

"Noway" says the boy. I think I was commenting on the penguins ("pegins"). Sunshine inspires a "Oops," which for some reason is now usually followed with "Mama's in the house."

"There they go!"

"And now we sleeeep. (Darth Vader style snore)"

"Eyes... Eat eyes... Teeth... Eat teeth."

And so on.

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Testing...

This is a test. I'm trying to see if I can blog from my ipod. Why? Well that's a good question I suppose. It does seem painfully slow. On the other hand, why not?

Not an inspired entry to be sure, but it is only a test.

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What rock have I been hiding under?

How did I not notice that we are on the verge of full on commercial spaceflight?



Way too cool for words!

The skinny on Hubble.

Ah... The times has the low down on Hubble. Serious, but not yet fatal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/science/space/W30hubb.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Free Fall!

So Congress seems to have adopted the Ron Carey/Mel Brooks Strategy for dealing with the current credit crisis. “I got it! I got it! I ain’t got it!... I’ll get it... I got it! I got it! I ain’t got it.” What is the plural of doofus? Doofi? Whatever it is, it’s apt.

cf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4kcEuRgXwI

Meanwhile, buried in the news today: NASA has postponed the Hubble rescue mission *because the telescope has stopped sending data!* (I saw this on MSNBC, so I assume it’s true, although I haven’t heard anything about this from NASA trough the AAS, which is unusual.) Not clear from the MSNBC report if all communications have been lost or just the data downlink. In any case, it’s not good!

Ouroboros

Bah! My brain is flummoxed by a familiar but long forgotten problem: The tendency of some of the fundamental equations of cosmology to wrap around and eat themselves in a bewildering and irritating manner. It doesn’t help that the notation and conventions in the literature are rather flexible as well. There must be 50 different ways of writing down the Friedmann equation in equivalent but subtly different manners. Blah... My head’s tired. It’s Friday and it doesn’t want to be wrestling with cosmology.

But there it is. It needs to get done. I have a class on Tuesday, and I need to have both a new problem set and a set of lecture notes ready. So I will return to trying to find a clean and clear way to show that the Friedmann equation predicts a universe that evolves away from flatness with time. This is a well known result, that seems to be addressed in a unique way in every textbook and set of lecture notes I have access to. Worse, it seems that they all seem to suffer from a bad case of handwaving or “then a miracle happens” syndrome in the math: making a leap that seems altogether reasonable on first glance, but which doesn’t seem to follow directly upon close examination.

Ah well, that’s why they pay me the big bucks right? To make sense of the self-eating-snake equations map out their curves for all to see? Boldly going where students would otherwise fear to tread? Which, in self-eating style brings us back to flags and snakes. Or Pretzels. Something topologically complex that wraps around itself endlessly. Like a closed universe. See, again I can’t seem to escape. I seem to have become trapped inside a semantic event horizon, with no way out but to hope I can quantum tunnel through the barrier and Hawking radiate myself to another topic.

Or maybe just give up and get back to work.

Shoe-horned

Strange idiom that... Nobody even uses a shoe horn any more. It’s an idiom which has entirely shed it’s origins. Almost as mysterious as Cockney rhyming.

Anyway, shoe-horned it is, as it is being written under a hard time limit imposed by the fact that I have another class to teach in 19 minutes. However, as I missed my opportunity this morning, and I’m unlikely to do much new in that time period, I thought I’d use it this way.

Still rusty. That’s for certain.

Why do I have REO Speedwagon in my head? Why, why, why? Perhaps it was Sunshine’s doing, but I don’t have any recollection of it recently, and it seems a bit on an unlikely candidate for NPRs background music this morning.

Yikes, does that make me feel like my parents! The clock radio in our room is now set to the local NPR station, and it totally reminds me of mornings as a kid waking up to the strains of “All Things Considered” wafting out of my parents bedroom. Of course, the downside of listening to NPR in the morning is that it starts your day with the panic alarms going off. Who needs caffeine when you have the thought of Sarah Palin in the White House to start your day?

Nothing makes me miss England like American politics. Actually it’s not American politics per se, it’s really American culture which is generally depressing. I guess I am exactly the sort of leftist elite over-educated Eurocentric snob that Republican politicians tell people to hate.

Also, I seem to be nostalgic for trains now...