This Is Drivel

I gathered up all my work clothes just before dinner last night and dumped them on top of the wash machine. I didn’t put them in the wash machine, as many sane people would have done, because the machine’s in a little alcove just off the dining room, and who wants to listen to it go chug-chug-chug while they’re eating dinner? Not me.

We had a tasty red wine with dinner, and then we had just a little more after dinner while we petted the cats. Always a pleasant way to enjoy wine.

After I cleaned up the dinner table, I joined My Darling B on the sofa and talked her into watching the last five episodes of season two of The Big Bang Theory, which only took two hours, give or take. Aaannnd we drank the rest of the wine. It was ten o’clock when we finished and we were feeling a little loopy, so we went to bed.

When I got out of the shower this morning and made my way into the dining room to grind the beans for the morning pot o’ joe, I noticed that all my work clothes were in a great big wad on top of the wash machine. Now how did those get there? I asked myself. B wouldn’t have taken them out of the drier and wadded them up like that, but how else would they have gotten that way? I’ll have to have some words with that girl. The voices in my head went on like that for quite a long time before I remembered that I couldn’t remember ever putting them into the wash machine in the first place.

If I could remember the name of that wine, I’d warn you off it.

I found a glove nailed to a telephone pole while I was taking a walk around the neighborhood near the office building where I work. I’ve seen lots of gloves dangling from nails in telephone poles (and fence posts, and buildings), so many it’s not even worth remarking on them, but this was a glove nailed to a telephone pole. Somebody had to find the glove. Somebody had to have a hammer and a nail. And the idea of nailing that glove to the telephone pole had to not only occur to him (I’m pretty sure it was a guy), but he had to think it was a good idea. And he did. And that glove is going to stay there until it rots, because why would anybody want it now?

My Darling B and I were watching The Big Bang Theory last night when we ran into a glitchy DVD that frustrated every attempt to get past the road block. We don’t subscribe to cable or satellite television, so we can’t watch television, but occasionally we check out DVDs from the library of shows we’ve heard are pretty good.

That’s how we got hooked on The Big Bang Theory. We seem to be tuned into the weird nerd humor of the show. We could both watch Jim Parsons, the guy who plays the part of Sheldon Cooper, crack jokes all night long. And the theme song is way too much fun to sing along with.

The second disk of the second season finally came in yesterday. My Darling B picked it up from the library on her way home. After dinner, we settled in to watch all six episodes. We watch television shows on DVD the way most people eat a bag of Doritos – the whole goddamn thing in one gulp. But halfway through, the fourth episode wouldn’t play. We both tried every way we could think of to get to it – chapter search; play all episodes and skip ahead; start at the end and back in; cycle the disk out and back in again after cleaning it with my t-shirt – but nothing seemed to work. We’d skip ahead to the end of episode three, start episode four and get nothing but gibberish and no picture.

“We could always go buy it at Shopko,” B suggested. Well, we could, but that would make us such a pair of gullible consumer assholes, wouldn’t it? I mean, running out on Black Friday, of all days, to buy a DVD of a television show. Might as well start shopping regularly at Wal-Mart.

Five minutes later we were backing out of the driveway, trading our favorite quotes from the show, and five minutes after that we were prowling the aisles among the DVDs at Shopko. Not only did we find the disk we were looking for, it turned out that Season Two was the only DVD of The Big Bang Theory on sale. Talk about lucky! And it was the entire second season. We won’t have to wait on the other two disks from the library. (But we violated The Doritos Principle and somehow managed not to stay up all night watching every goddamn show.)

For the record, we’re both in agreement that the best quote from the show so far was Sheldon’s reaction when his sister told him she’s “always bragging to her friends about, ‘My brother, the rocket scientist.’” “You tell people I’m a rocket scientist? I’m a theoretical physicist! Why don’t you just tell them I’m a toll-taker on the Golden Gate Bridge!”

I walked home from the office yesterday, just to see if I could still use my legs for more than a mile or two at a stretch. As it turned out, I can. But it also turned out that, when I got home, I had to put my feet up on the recliner for twenty minutes or so and refresh my constitution with the help of a cold beer.

Walking is one of those things I assume I can do no matter how flabby I’ve let myself get or far I have to go, because it’s just walking, right? It’s not a stretch to think that. I do it all the time. I even tell myself sometimes that I probably walk five miles every day up and down the corridors of the office building where I work, because I’m a deluded maroon.

It’s about five miles from the office where I work, over hill and dale to Our Humble O’Bode in Monona. Five miles isn’t that far, I figured. How hard could it be?

I walked through the Willy Street neighborhood, then over the Yahara River into the part of town called Schenk’s Corner on Atwood Avenue. I was doing just fine as I strode down the hill on Atwood Avenue past Olbrich Gardens, but right about the time I reached the East Side Club I knew I was going to have a problem soon.

Here’s the thing: On Willy Street, and all along Atwood Avenue, there are ample places to stop for a cup of coffee or a sandwich and, not incidentally, to use the conveniences that come with places like that. Once you round the corner past Olbrich Park, though, and head south toward Monona, there are almost none of those places. The East Side Club wasn’t open yet, and I’m lactose intolerant, so popping into Michael’s Frozen Custard would have been awkward. I’m the kind of guy who feels it’s only polite to buy something to go if I stop at a store to use the bathroom. It’s not like I can slip a cone topped with soft ice cream into my bag. I had to hold out until I got as far as Cottage Grove Road, where I could duck into Java Cat and buy a bottle of orange juice before discreetly slipping into the rest room.

That made me feel a little better, for a little while. I was definitely starting to feel a little fatigued as I headed up Monona Drive toward the Lakeshore Mall. It had taken about forty-five minutes to get that far, and I figured I would be able to walk five miles in about an hour and a half, so I should have been about halfway home. It was a long, uphill slog past the San Daminano priory to the top of the hill where the Monona Grove High School stands. I was so flushed by the time I got there that I had to open my jacket.

It was getting dark by the time I got as far as Dean Avenue and the home stretch down Monona Drive. It takes me only ten minutes or so to walk home from there when I go that route on my daily morning stroll. Yesterday my time was more on the “or so” side of the estimate. My legs were going numb, I could feel the tendons in the heels of my feet throbbing with every step, and I had a nagging cramp in my right pinkie toe. I wasn’t even aware the pinkie toe had usable muscles in it.

As I turned down Frost Woods Avenue and covered the last three blocks between my tired body and a big, comfy chair, I realized I didn’t have a set of house keys. They’re on the ring with the car keys, which was in My Darling B’s handbag – not a problem when I normally wait for her to pick me up after work, but a problem when I decide to walk home on the spur of the moment. It took me a little while but I did finally figure out how to get into the house without a key. I’ll have to make sure that gets fixed.

I’ve always understood that nothing travels faster than the speed of light because it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object to light speed. I’m not saying that’s correct, mind you, I’m only saying that’s what I’ve been given as an explanation for why the speed of light is an absolute.

I’ve also understood that, as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass increases and keeps on increasing until, at the point where it would reach the speed of light, its mass would become infinite. This has been presented as another reason that nothing in the universe can move faster than light.

These understandings, and the foofraw that erupted as a result of some neutrinos apparently exceeding the speed of light just recently, came bubbling up through my more or less random thoughts as I was taking a shower this morning, and merged into one, big musing bubble thusly: If the neutrinos were moving faster than light, then the particle accelerator they came from must have used an infinite amount of energy to accelerate them to that speed, and they should have acquired an infinite mass. If their mass was infinite, the whole universe must have been swallowed up in its gravitational pull, and we are now part of an infinitely massive black hole.

But life in a black hole apparently isn’t all that bad. At least they have hot showers there.

My Darling B seemed to think she could leave some foods in the freezer “for eternity.” I pointed out that she couldn’t, but she insisted she could. “But eventually the continent will be flooded,” I pointed out, “and if we’re talking really long-term, when the sun dies it will engulf the whole planet, and everything here will be vaporized.” Such a look she gave me.

I went to Menard’s last night to buy some sandpaper. All I wanted was some sandpaper so I could sand down a slab of plywood I wanted to use for a desk top so I could apply a second coat of shellac to it. Menard’s had all kinds of sandpaper, as long as I wanted it cut specially for a wide range of sanders, but I couldn’t find a single sheet of regular old sandpaper, no matter how far I walked away from the sanders. There just was no sandpaper. I thought maybe it might be somewhere else, the way that good old-fashioned non-power tools have their own section that’s far away from the cool tools. I found lots of regular saws and screwdrivers that ran on plain old elbow grease, but no big, square pieces of sandpaper you could stick to a block of wood. Finally, I broke down and asked a clerk I found taking inventory in an aisle. He ran off in a a very definite direction, working his feet like he had a destination in mind, and I followed him expecting big things, but we ended up at a computer station where he punched the word “sandpaper” into a google search, then led me right back to the section of power tools I had just been visiting. There is no sandpaper at Menard’s. How screwed up is that?

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this before, but there’s about a zillion squirrels out there. I just came home from a walk around the neighborhood and counted a thousand million billion on our street alone, all out collecting nuts or whatever squirrels do at this hour of the morning. Whatever it was, they had more energy than a preschool full of toddlers. If they ever learn how to use chain saws, we’re done for.

First thing we did yesterday, after cleaning up and making ourselves presentable to the world, was jump in the car and head into town to see if Lazy Jane’s still had pumpkin waffles with real maple syrup whipped cream. They said they did, but My Darling B was reading their specials at eight or eight-thirty on Facebook and if you don’t get down to Lazy Jane’s until after nine the line’s already out the door and the specials board already has several erasures by the time you get to the cash register.

There was no line when we got there, but the place was so crazy-stuffed with people that we had to wait for a table. It was still worth the wait. Life is too short not to tuck into a plate of yummy waffles when they’re offered to you. Write that down, it’s important to remember that.

Neil deGrasse Tyson recently appeared on the “Ask Me Anything” page of Reddit and blew the minds of Redditors during an hour-long Q & A. Here are some of my favorite questions and the answers Tyson gave:

Q. If you could impress one thing on young people today, what would it be?

N.d.T. That adults are not all they’re cracked up to be. And most of them are wrong most of the time. This can be quite revelatory for a kid – often launching them on a personal quest of exploration, rather than of Q&A sessions with their parents.

Q. If you could add one course to a student’s curriculum, what would it be?

N.d.T. Course title every university should offer: “How to tell when someone else is full of shit”

Q. Can we inspire more kids to pursue space-related science and research? If so, how?

N.d.T. Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. The beat the curiosity out of the kids. They out-number kids. They vote. They wield resources. That’s why my public focus is primarily adults.

Q. What one improvement would you make to the way our society as a whole approaches science if it were within your power?

N.d.T. Society needs to see science not as a luxury of funding but as a fundamental activity that drives enlightenment, economics, and security. Science agencies should never have to go hat in hand to congress.

One idea would be for the USA (or any other country for that matter) to earmark 10% of its budget to R&D. Like a good startup company might do. That way everyone knows what to expect annually. And long term research projects will have some hope of funding stability.

Q. What is the simplest thing in your life that makes you happy?

N.d.T. Watching a person learn something new – not simply a new fact (those are cheap and easy) – but achieve a new understanding for how the world works. That’s the only reward a (true) educator ever seeks.

Q. What is your opinion about science/math education in high school? It seems to me like we emphasize far to much on facts that most people will never need, rather than encouraging people to think creatively and logically.

N.d.T. Agree 100%. Any time we are answer-driven rather than idea driven, we have lost the true meaning of education.

Q. What is your favorite fact about the Universe?

N.d.T. That it will never end. That it’s on a one way trip of expansion. Something that many find to be philosophically unsettling. My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.

My two very favorite exchanges I saved for last. I loved that Tyson answered this flip question with a very considered answer:

Q. If a taco and a burrito are traveling near the speed of light and collide, will the result be delicious?

N.d.T. The result would be an explosion large enough to destroy a small village. High speed collisions do that, whether or not they are made of Mexican food.

And the answer to this question is still blowing my mind:

Q. Since time slows relative to the speed of light, does this mean that photons are essentially not moving through time at all?

N.d.T. Yes. Precisely. Which means — are you seated?

Photons have no ticking time at all, which means, as far as they are concerned, they are absorbed the instant they are emitted, even if the distance traveled is across the universe itself.

This Q & A spawned a long discussion between dozens of Redditors, one of which attempted to explain the answer this way:

You can’t ascribe macroscopic analogies to quantum scale events. It doesn’t work because nature on that scale is so different than our everyday experiences.

To sum up the central point – photons don’t travel. They don’t really exist in flight. You can’t sidle up next to light passing from here to alpha centauri and watch it mid-flight. As soon as you do, it’s not in flight anymore.

What actually happens in reality is that an electron (or charged particle) over there will move in a particular way, and that makes an electron over here move in a particular way. Nothing else.

We can use a model based on waves to determine, probabilistically, where that effect is likely going to take place. We can also use a model based on particles (photons) to describe the nature of how that effect will act.

But it’s just a model. One must be extremely careful that we don’t ascribe other properties inherent in the model, such as existence, to the phenomenon being described.

The discussion ended (as much as a discussion such as this can end) with this poetic observation:

I love how existence can be a property that some things are capable of not having.