Boulder Jumps and Fog

We’re living in the time of covid. There’s another surge right now; it started just before Christmas, and with the cold, rainy wether and holiday gatherings it’s cruising along. As a result, I’ve been somewhat terrified of the kids injuring themselves. We’ve never had to go to the emergency room. It seems that now would be a terrible time to start.

I made myself worry even more when, on an early morning walk, I stepped onto one of the rocks scattered throughout our local park—for people to perch on or to create borders—and promptly and unceremoniously slipped right back off, my hiking sandals finding no purchase atop the boulder made slick by the morning’s fog and the previous night’s rain.

Things got so bad—in my own mind—that a few days back I did one of the thing I try very hard never to do. I asked the kids to be careful when they were playing on the rocks. It was ridiculous. I regretted having said it immediately. The kids grew up in that park. They know every single rock like an old friend—better than I ever will.

Then today, it all got better. The sun wasn’t up yet, the horizon was just beginning to subtly glow as I peered through the fog at the six year-old. She was doing one of the games she and her sibs invented in the park; jumping from the top of one rock to the top of its nearest neighbor. Sometimes the neighbor wasn’t very nearby. That’s when I’d catch glimpses of the kid launching and then gliding through the air, landing without even a twitch atop the next boulder.

After a bit, she reached the end of the chain, and leapt down to the ground, landing as securely, as ruggedly, and as gracefully as you please.

Everything was better instantly. For a few moments, I was reminded that everything is going to be alright. The kids developed their own competencies, and they’re going to be just fine being the people thy’ve made themselves into.

Comments

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