This and That

One of my goals in starting a blog was to capture the state of my life at various points so they don't drift off into the foggy blur of old memories. So today I'm going to write about a bunch of random stuff that's going on right now.

• The monkeys are at a great age right now (1.5/3/4/4). The Superhero set up the basement a couple of weekends ago for to be kid-friendly, and they're actually using it independently some of the time. About a year and a half ago I remember the transition when we went from having to do basic housework when everyone was sleeping to being able to do some of it when the kids were awake. Now we're transitioning to being able to do grown-up things while the kids are awake. It's great. Last Saturday we had sex twice in the morning while the kids played on the main floor.


• On that note, The Superhero has been very amourous lately; sans any kind of reading material that might influence her in that direction. I thank hormones, helped along by the recent egg donation.


• The kids getting old enough to just about understand some things. They know that I go to work to make money, and we use it to buy food. I tried to explain taxes the other day, but it didn't go over so well.


• I'm on a physics kick recently. I just worked out the speed of a small "wobble" in a disk as compared to the speed of rotation of the disk. Turns out the disk wobbles at twice the speed of the disk's rotation for small wobbles. It follows from setting up the equations for the position of any particle at any time, differentiating to get speed and acceleration, and then requiring that the angular momentum is constant since there's no outside torques. I'm now reading the popular version of the theory of relativity by Einstein. I tried the real version (with all the math details) and it became so dense that I switched to the softer one, sadly. It's the neatest physics problem there will probably ever be, since:
  1. It's very simple: consider that non-accelerating frames of reference are indistinguishable, and that the speed of light is constant. The whole problem is: if these two things are true, what are the implications? (the apparent paradox is that if you walk away from me and I shine a flashlight at the speed of light, you'd think that you'd observe the light going at the speed of light less the speed of you're walking, but we said the speed of light is constant and each frame of reference is equivalent for judging that, so you actually also see the light going at the speed of light!)
  2. The subject is things that are more or less part of our everyday experience (trains, embankments, etc.). It's not like particle physics where the trick is imagining what tiny things we've never see are like.
  3. The whole trick is questioning the simplest things we depend on (like our conceptions of space and time), and remembering what you can still think and what is wrong. Very tricky!
  
  

That's it for now; it's time for Wednesday night burgers (Friday night steak's ugly cousin).