Sunday night is the worst time of the week. It's the smoldering stub of the week, the time that I realize that I have used up yet another seven days of my life. Even before I got the day job, I felt like this. It will not get any better as I get older, either. Even if I have a pleasant social engagement or some other nice thing on Sunday night, it still rolls around to the wee hours and the darkness and the sense that I am not achieving as much as I would like to. At the pace I am going, I will be sixty before I get to quantum mechanics, if I get there at all.

I am reviewing acceleration again. I have lost count of how many times I have gone through this material, but I have to do it again to get to new material in the book directly after it. It's not that I forget it; a quick review brings it back to me. But I still get that horrified feeling for a quick moment, looking at it, that I have never seen this before, that those numbers and square roots and symbols on the page are just incomprehensible squiggles. Then I remember what they are there for, and it's like a camera lens focusing in on something and bringing familiarity with it. Distance divided by time equals velocity (speed). The change in velocity divided by time elapsed equals acceleration. Find the distance covered, by multiplying…etc.

Today is the first day of spring, and in my area there was weird weather. There was a rush of dark clouds, and the first thunder and lightning of the year, followed by a rain of large, snowball-like hail. The projectiles were not hard pellets; they were wet skwushy chunks of ice and liquid water that went splorch on my car as I was driving. After a thick fall of splorches, the rain fell, and then the storm was gone, as quickly as it came. Let's see: a wet hail chunk falls out of a dark cloud at a specified height. How long does it take to arrive at your windshield with a chilly splat? And how long will it take for spring to really arrive?

After I make the accelerating raindrops make sense again, I am off to circular motion, and then into the next Newtonian room of forces, momentum, and orbits. After that, according to my Barron's physics book, I will once again enter clanking industrial workshops full of simple machines like pulleys and levers and gears.

The Spring Equinox is also the Persian New Year. I wish all my Persian friends a very happy, prosperous, and light-filled New Year. And for all the musicians in my life, happy Bach's birthday.

Posted at 2:33 am | link