The weather is finally hot enough for me, as the saying goes. Everyone who knows me knows that I am a hot weather fan, and I'm certainly using the fan these days. I love the summer heat, and I even love the summer humidity. For the last few days I have been in the steam kettle along with millions of other people. There have been storms but not in my neighborhood, so nothing cools it down. I hide at work in my art closet, fortunately air-conditioned. In a few short months I will be freezing again, which is no comfort.

I dream of moving to a place (in the USA) which is summery all year long. There are a few of them, but I am not sure what life is like there or whether intellectual rigor is possible in a perpetually balmy climate. The Nobel-prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac ended his days as a professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and another physics Nobelist, Robert Schrieffer now teaches there, so someone is doing high-level physics in summery Florida. Would I like a world filled with sand and palm trees? It's yet another one of those things I cannot permit myself to think about.

I admire Dirac for his great achievements but also for his famous terseness and lack of effusiveness. I would love to be the brilliant but silent type who never talks too much. As it is I am constantly telling myself not to say most of the things I would like to say, either here on this Weblog or in real life. It's a never-ending effort.

Meanwhile, speaking of never-ending efforts, I am crawling my way through yet another round of acceleration problems and solutions, this time in Schaum's red book. The work is made a bit more confusing by several annoying typo's in the problems which cause me to solve diligently for a solution which isn't there, since the solution is given for the problem without the typo error. At least I know it's a typo, which is a kind of reverse satisfaction in problem-solving. I will review my way through what I have covered in the "easier" physics book and then figure out where to go next. Florida, perhaps.

Posted at 2:51 am | link