A Sleepless Night, A Ghost Story, and A Movie Review

A blood-curdling, heart-wrenching wail pierced the silence of the house. The scream came from Number 3, our youngest. She's still co-sleeping, (a fancy attachment parenting term for sleeping with her parents), so I immediately checked her to see what was wrong. Her eyes were clamped tightly shut. She was still asleep.

Intense nightmares seem to be hereditary around here. I had them as a one-year-old, and so far each of the kids have had them in succession at the same age.

I, for one, at least had an interesting excuse. My parents, both teachers, moved to the Hopi Reservation, (pictured by Ansel Adams below), a few months after I was born. It's a beautiful, but isolated part of the country. It's also haunted.

The Hopis, pacifists who live atop three sheer mesas in what is now Northeastern Arizona, had developed a brutal but effective means for dealing with social issues. When the black plague spread across the Southwest, the Hopis, using this method, suffered less than some other tribes. Having realized the disease was contagious, they simply pushed those afflicted with it off the edge of a mesa.

The death by mesa technique was also used during the Pueblo Revolt. The pacifist Hopis served in the revolt only as messengers. When two of their young messengers returned with their hands cut off by the Spaniards who had captured them, the Hopis pushed every Spanish man, woman, and child who lived among them over the edge.

Over the years, the mesas have become crowded with the ghosts of those who have fallen to their deaths. The story goes that I, (among others), could see them. My nightmares were eyes open affairs. I'm told my parents would find me staring straight-ahead, screaming bloody murder., presumably at the offending ghost.

One, two, and three have no such excuse as far as I'm aware, but this hasn't stopped them from developing the same affliction. Once we get them awake, we've found that a midnight viewing of "French Music", is the best way to bring everyone back down off the ceiling.

"French Music" is our colloquial title for "A Good Year" starring Russell Crowe. I introduced the movie pretty early on to our oldest kid, Number 1. When Number 1 and I watched it, it served as our Saturday morning movie for cuddling till Mom woke up. I usually get up between 4 and 5 to have the house to myself for a few hours, and Number 1 pops up about 6. The movie is imminently pleasant, with nary a stressful scene, so we'd lazily cuddle for two hours or so, watching mostly the French countryside, and listening to the pleasantly lilting waltz music that plays softly in almost every scene.

The movie chronicles the pivotal decisions that enter the life of one Maximillian Skinner, (played by Crowe). He inherits an Estate in the French countryside, shown above, and must decide whether to maintain the luxurious life of a London-based international banker, or retreat to the vagaries of a moneyed life on his Uncle's estate. There's the teenciest bit of existential angst, (if one could call it that), but the rest of the movie is filled with pleasant people doing pleasant things in a pleasant location.

Considering the director, it's rather ironic that over time this movie also become our go-to nightmare remedy; seeing as it's the perfect antithesis of the other movies made by Ridley Scott: Alien, Blade Runner, and Hannibal!

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in...

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog