Thank you, Donald Trump. Watching your show on Monday and Tuesday was like a canteen of cold clean water to a man dying of thirst in the desert. I feel I’ve been paid back for any trouble I’ve taken on your behalf in the last four years. Hallelujah and amen.
Okay now it’s up to Trump and his merry band of madmen to fix Washington and fix the country and do that list of a million impossible things that he said he’s going to do. Have at it, boys. Give ‘em hell.
So, what’s for me to talk about tonight? Well, I’ve got to talk about what’s chasing around my head tonight. First off, I’m grumbling about how damn cold it is today. The heating system at the Compound is undersized. Or maybe the insulation should be the focus. When the outside temperature dips below zero Fahrenheit, it won’t hold a set point above seventy. And that’s too bad because I hate being cold inside my own home. Camera Girl holds me directly responsible because I never put the weatherstripping around two of the external doors. I explained to her that these small insulation problems are only a minor part of the problem and that I’m addressing the problem holistically by spending considerable time thinking deeply about all the ways that a solution can be reached. I’ve considered the thermodynamic aspects of the problem. The psychological ramifications of the fear of cold. The physiological mechanisms by which the human body adapts to hypothermia. The cultural involvement of cold in the human industries that are called clothing and shelter. The quantum meaning of absolute zero. And finally, the latest bill from the heating oil company. All these things I showed her and admonished her to have patience and faith in my stewardship of the Compound’s Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (U). None of this registered with her at all. She made certain primitive Sicilian gestures with her face and hand that I won’t dignify with detail. Suffice it to say they were not helpful in the least. I’m going out tomorrow for other reasons. But I may also pick up some weatherstripping. Maybe.
I was recently in a discussion about General Relativity with a friend. The question of the curvature of space came up. I told him I’ve never been convinced of the idea that mass curves space-time. I stated that what is the difference if gravity bends the path of light and matter when it comes close to an object like the sun but space is unaffected? How would we know the difference? After all, how the hell can you bend something that isn’t even there? It’s empty space. Now sure, particles are always popping into existence because of quantum effects. But by definition those things aren’t empty space they’re matter. So how the hell can something that’s nothing bend? Anyway, after the argument got us nowhere, I got hold of a book on general relativity and started reading it. But my mathematical skills have degraded so I’ve had to break out a book on vector analysis to try and remember what tensor notation means. Oh, my aching head. I had an old advanced calculus test from my undergraduate days that would be very helpful on some points but then I remembered I threw it out (stupidly) about thirteen years ago when I moved. I was going to buy it used and was amazed how expensive text books have gotten. Yikes!
So anyway, I’m ensconced with the Kronecker delta, the curl and the Laplacian. And I think I’ve made a big mistake. I predict by the end I’ll have nothing but a murky idea of the meaning of the proofs of relativity but no explanation as to why we would think of space as being curved. I think the idea that space is curved is just a figure of speech. The reality is “space’ goes on endlessly in every direction. I don’t think it loops back around behind us or anything like that. It just keeps going. It’s the same as physicists saying that the beginning of the universe was the Big Bang. Well, what about five seconds before that?
So here I am with my cave man cosmogeny and cosmology trying to relearn Einstein’s equations (at my age!). Well, why not? Trump’s fixing the country. The least I can do is straighten out the theoretical physicists. Camera Girl! Where’s my slide rule?
Gotta love the old slipstick. I held onto mine for years, even after most of my peers had gone over to calculators. I liked scientific notation. Simple, elegant, and it doesn’t trip you up with a lot of extra decimal places.
I worked with an old engineer from the Greatest Generation and he didn’t use a hand calculator. He used Excel for the work he handed in but for his calculations he used a slipstick or his memory and pen and paper. He would do square roots in his head and he would do them fast. He was good.
My 1st couple of years in engineering school (1966-1967) were with a slip stick. A number of years followed spent in the military and civilian employment before I paused my hedonistic lifestyle to complete my degree in Civil Engineering in 1975. When I started back in 1973, slip sticks were gone in favor of calculators. I started off with a $240 (in 1973 dollars!) Bowmar, by current standards, the equivalent of a current $12 scientific calculator. But I quickly gravitated to an HP 45. I can’t remember who I had to kill to get the cash for the over $400… Read more »
Ah, the Hewlett-Packard 15C! My most cherished possession. Reverse Polish Notation, programmable memory(!) and advanced functions. I still have it. I still use it (from time to time). You’re right. Nothing beats youth for enjoying life as it comes at you.