A Holiday Message from DTA

 


 

Wee Fish

Ewe

 

A Mare

Egrets


  

Moose

Panda

Hippo

Gnu

Deer!














Hint: It helps if you sing it.

"Wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose panda hippo gnu deer" 

[All photos Animals Pictures Archive]  

Moguls on the Move

Help! I'm a Rocky Mountain skier trapped in the flat-lands!

At Improbable Research I found this story describing how moguls - those bumpy things on a ski slope, gradually work their way uphill. That should make sense to experienced skiers, though now there is an article at Physics Today that makes it more than just anecdotal belief. The video below illustrates the movement over the course of the ski season:



The ski slope is a run call Riflesight Notch at Mary Jane ski area, Winter Park, Colorado. It looked familiar even before I read the text describing the video. I have been there many times, skiing the moguls until every muscle ached and loving every minute of it, then dinner at Katie's Beanery in Granby on the way home.

Paradise.

The Meaning of Gravity

There is SOMETHING happening on the internet! OK, so maybe that wasn't specific enough. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy Objects, MarkCC of Good Math, Bad Math calls him on it, and I'm honestly not quite sure what they are on about. Something philosophical, I think.

What I do know is that it started off with a comment about the meaning of gravity. Silly people! Douglas Adams explained all this to us long ago!




Here is a more recent version of the story of the Sperm Whale and the Bowl of Petunias.

Douglas Adams: Parrots the Universe and Everything

Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world's creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity.

The whole video is an hour and a half, so make some time, and grab a snack and a drink.

Viva Flatland

Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbot, was my first math book. I probably had math textbooks in school before this, but Flatland is the book I remember. Flatland mattered, because it caught my imagination.
My Dad showed me this book, and walked me through the concepts of understanding dimensions. I learned to that a creature in a two-dimensional Flatland would find it difficult to grasp the concept of a third "up and down" dimension completely outside of their experience. This gave me a new insight on how our own 3-D world might seem similarly "flat" to a creature that lives and perceives in 4 or more dimensions. The concept of higher dimensions, which was and is beyond my experience, suddenly made sense, and these were fascinating thoughts for my pre-teen mind.

My Dad taught me a lot of cool stuff. He was a Physicist by training, and a Computer Scientist from the time when the field was just inventing itself. There were always science books around the house, not to mention science fiction. Also magazines; The latest issues of Science, Scientific American, and Analog could usually be found on his desk. These provided a constant supply of real and fanciful ideas for a young mind. My dad always thought of himself as a scientist. He always tried to keep up with the latest innovations and discoveries in science and technology. He never stopped trying to learn, and perhaps the greatest thing he ever taught me was that I should never stop trying to learn either.

When I started writing this post a few days ago, it was just supposed to be about Flatland, and my rediscovery of an old book that had a big influence on me. Thing change though, and so have the direction of my thoughts over the past few days. My father, my teacher, my mentor, passed away peacefully last night, his body finally giving in to illness and deterioration brought on by progressive dementia. I thought I was prepared for this, but knowledge that death is coming doesn't quite prepare you for its arrival. Though his slow decline has been painful to see, I am grateful he could be with us for so long, and that the disease took him as quickly as it did; Amazingly quickly compared to what I understand to be the normal course of dementia, which is a testament to how well he was able to adapt and compensate for as long as he did.

Things change, and the student becomes the teacher. One of my reasons for this blog is to pass on some of that fascination with science that my Dad instilled in me. Also, to pass along (some might say "inflict") some of his sense of humor as well, which I also seem to have inherited.

Things change. People pass on. I miss you Dad. God bless.

In Loving Memory: Douglas Earl Eastwood (1924-2009).
UPDATE: A memorial blog for stories and comments can be found at http://deememorial.blogspot.com/.

[Hat tip to God Plays Dice for leading me to E-Books Directory and 4DLab, where is found this PDF edition of Flatland. Hence the source of the illustrations.]